Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/357

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but never got on with. What I mean is that for us there can be no real forgetting. We have seen too much of it, known too many people's sorrow, felt it too much, to return to an existence in which it has no part.' He finishes a letter dated 8th April 1917: 'I think it will be summer soon, and perhaps the war will end this year and I shall see my Pretty One again.' Next day he fell mortally wounded, leading an attack on Havricourt Wood.

In easier times we have sorrowed over the untimely fate of the young poet who has died with all his promise unfulfilled. Here is not merely one such, but a great and goodly company of poets, and in face of a tragedy so immeasurable, a loss so utterly beyond reckoning, words become idle and meaningless. It is something, it is much, to all those whose sons, husbands, brothers, lovers they were that their country shall hold them for ever in grateful remembrance, something that