Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/23

Rh had deserted the Socialist cause out of respect for "the loaves and the fishes." This friend writes:

"'I don't suppose many people knew what an ardent love he had for honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty, and what sacrifices he made for them—sacrifices of peace-of-mind abhorrent to most Englishmen ... caused himself no end of worry and unhappiness.'"

Yes, facing discomfort clears the will, as facing physical danger clears the head, and wrong within can be defeated by braving evil abroad. And now while intellectual honesty is at a premium I will confess that the last two lines of his Into Battle always disappoint me. They ring hollow and empty; it is as though he had been disturbed and scribbled in haste something that looks like an end but is not, and never given his mind to the poem again.

The other poems published since are slighter in mood and more boyish in execution. Though they are not bad, they are not good enough to enhance the effect of Into Battle.

Physically, mentally and morally splendid, he might seem to have done little in this world but be and be destroyed. Yet to have been, and to be known to have been such as he was, may well in time seem one of the grandest facts of these times. Such admiration as we owe to him is an experience as rare as it is beneficent, and will outlast a vast number of topics and crazes. Two phases of his worth he revealed even to those who never met him: the one in his poem, the other in his letters; and they tally as the like aspects have rarely tallied in other men. This proves the density of the integrity that was destroyed by a fragment of iron. He lay wounded a few weeks before he ceased to suffer.

The worst horror of modern war is not the vastness of its destructions but the number of spirits whom it enslaves to machinery; and in this it closely resembles Rh