Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/28

 for them; but it does not appear that he took any very active steps to that effect. His days were mainly spent in the British Museum, and his evenings with a coterie of friends at the Café Royal. In the middle of July, his father came to England and spent a week with him. Of this meeting Mr. Seeger writes:

Two days earlier, the Austrian Ultimatum had been presented to Serbia; on that very day the time limit expired, the Serbian reply was rejected, and the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. The wheels of fate were already whirling.

As soon as it became evident that a European war was inevitable Alan returned to Paris. He took Bruges on his way, and there left the manuscript of his poems in the keeping of a printer, not foreseeing the risks to which he was thus exposing them.

The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty or fifty of his fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France. Why did he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war to be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which, when it offered itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal. xxiv