Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/37

 allows us to think more about eating than fighting, still we do not actually forget that we are in a battle line."

And every now and then comes the bursting of a shell immediately overhead, and the rattle of its fragments on the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out. Think what it must have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous trench, a grand orchestral concert of this music of human madness!

The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief. "It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moon light breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze with the beauty of the northern stars."

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