Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/352

288 of fiction and was in his fortieth year when the war burst upon us. He had been educated at St. Paul's School, and at Oxford; and four years after leaving Oxford was, in 1902, married to Miss Carol Howard Fry, and was settled in Hertfordshire, happy in his work and the growth of his literary reputation, when the fatal August 1914 changed everything. Within a month, though he was well beyond military age, he enlisted in the Public Schools Battalion of the 19th Royal Fusiliers as a private. 'He was,' says Mr. Edmund Gosse, in an introduction to Vernede's War Poems, 'without any predilection for military matters and without any leaning to what are called "Jingo" views. But when once the problem of the attack of Germany on the democracy of the world was patent to him, he did not hesitate for a moment.' His profound conviction of the rightness of the cause for which he was to lay down his life runs like a glowing thread through much of his poetry. The selfless aspiration he voices in 'A Petition' is