Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/87

Rh before the war darkened over us or, as with Colwyn Philipps, like the soldier poets of old, they preferred to forget it awhile in their verses and remember, instead, the happier things they had known before it and hoped to know again after. Colwyn Philipps was the eldest son of Lord St. Davids. He had resolved to make the Army his profession while he was still at Eton; the war found him a captain in the Horse Guards; and you have only to read the poems and letters in his book to see how completely he realised Chaucer's ideal of the soldier and was 'a very perfect gentle knight.' To stoop to any creed of military 'frightfulness' would have been utterly impossible for the brotherly, high-minded man who carelessly unlocked his heart in the verses which were published after he had been killed in action near Ypres, on 13th May 1915. You may know from his poems that he, too, loved children and dogs and horses; was a keen sportsman, fond of the open-air life; was scornful of social and religious humbug and hypocrisy; was