Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/328

268 words to discover their first and fresh meaning. He wrote in phrases, and used words at second-hand as the journalists do.' That in him, as in so many other of its poets, the war wakened new powers of thought and utterance is clear from a comparison of his earlier verses with the poems he wrote under its influence.

Before the war he had looked younger than his years; but when he had endured and suffered and seen others suffer two years of life in the trenches, he aged so and seemed so old and worn that a nurse who had known him well for long past, meeting him after an interval, did not recognise him. 'If I were asked to state briefly the impression of him which remains with me most firmly,' writes Sir Andrew, 'I should say it was of continuous laughter. That is not true, of course, for in repose his face was heavy, his countenance more than ruddy, it was even of a choleric cast, and at times almost livid, especially when he was recovering from one of those attacks of asthma from which he habitually suffered. But his smile was his own, and