Nietzsche regarded as finally closed, is well-nigh ajar once more. Brooke's amused alertness is like that of a child who watches a door emphatically closed upon a cupboard declared to be empty by grown-up assurance; it creaks, and mysteriously seems to stir; other little boys and girls, his playmates, pay scant attention to its unaccountable behaviour. He himself thinks he has seen that the cupboard was vacant, and yet, in spite of himself, is fascinated by the possibility of a ghostly opener. Smiling over his own fancies, Brooke seems to have sat half abstracted at a pleasure party till the outbreak of war. He immediately volunteered, though delicate and but recently returned from a voyage across America and through the Pacific Islands in search of health—health which finally failed him before he had struck a blow or fired a shot, though he had been to Antwerp with the naval expedition.
To-day he stands with Julian Grenfell, as I see them through their work, in attitudes that suggest statues more worthy of the acropolis of the supreme city than any of those which the public figures of these times have yet assumed. What is done is always faulty, but what is intended may sometimes be divinely fair; and early death leaves this untampered with. Finely wrought bronze, these youths and their peers from other lands stand in that lofty garden above the ideal town, listening to their "friends" the trees. At their feet children play on the grass, and young girls crumble bread to lure doves down from the heroic shoulders; while for the men who glance at them in passing the inspiration of their bearing is all that remains of the Great War. The ardent Grenfell leaps forward; Brooke with smiling grace escapes from the uncomfortable admiration of a bygone age—both bent on grasping by the hand their new and best friend, Death.
