Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/182

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144
For Remembrance

for the new life upon which he had entered, he gave himself up to it completely and enthusiastically—'doing the thing he loathed for the thing he loved.' Early in December 1915 he was in France; a few weeks later he took his place in the front lines, and after ten days of trench fighting, was killed. These lines, which are among the poems collected into his posthumous volume, The Quest of Truth, might have been inspired by some strange fore-knowledge of the manner of death he was to die:

Suddenly a great noise shall fill my ears,
Like angry waters or the roar of men;
I shall be dizzy, faint with many fears;
Blindly my hands shall clutch the air—and then
I shall be walking 'neath the quiet skies,
In the familiar land of former years,
Among familiar faces. I shall arise
In that dear land where there are no more tears

—for it was so death came to him. He was inspecting a dug-out which had been shelled when several shells came over and one struck him and, engulfed instantly in its burst of noise and darkness, 'from that moment,' writes his commanding