Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/45

 absurd rumours had been started. Here one has a wholesome notion of the unimportance of the individual. It needs an effort of imagination to conceive of its making any particular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under. So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.

After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and did not return to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness." Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb. As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished. It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital. On his recovery he obtained two months congé de convalescence, part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time, much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession of "Juvenilia." On April 13th he wrote to his mother:

On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine," Mrs. Weeks: "The château in the grounds of which we are barracked, has a most beautiful name—Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty? I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it, as a ring is xli