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[Page 27]
Oct. 4
24.
Writing now – for the sake of company. I've read again "The City of Fear". Of all war stuff, it the most convincingly true, and the horror of warr's atmosphere is in it.
Read aloud, its musick and strength would make the hearing of it something never to be forgotten.
Over the grave
'Of the work that was spared for the sake of the work, by the verandahs of elder wars.
'Only one tattered pinnacle leers to the calm of the outraged stars.'
Of the enormous heaping ruins of the Cloth Hall, what will be done. Standing still – torn terribly but still standing above all other peer pinnacles are the ruins of the town, and facing the Poperinghe Road entrance to the City is a great doorway, highly arched to the Gothic design, and bearing behind and about it great mountains of brick and stone and dust. Amongst its ruin too still is standing, terribly scrapped by shells and great explosions, the broken gables of another of the halls, or of a separate building in the Cloth Hall style.
Even in ruin beautiful traceries still stand – some quite clean from tears, and still the fretting of one rose window with a triangular above it bravely shews traceried light.
As Rheims, some part of these ruins should everlastingly testify to warr's hell fury, to warr's horror, and to warr's blindness.
To the horror and terror and blindness of war, not to hate and fury of individual peoples.
Tom and Jack are back, there's been heavy shelling about the stations, and the rumour at the A.D.S. of two further killed, and 7 wounded. The Ambulance is in its Death throes.
25. Oct. 5
I cut it out of the Bulletin some while ago, and found it this morning amongst the Dad's letters. A poem of M. Forest, "Farms". The argument last week at Steenvoorde was M. Forest's sex. Could a woman write this –
'A wanton by a churchman's side
Flickers a fan of scarlet, set
With diamonds, and that fan sweeps wide
Across the land, and wider yet:
The while the dimpled hands of her
Proclaim themselves the arbiter –
The downward sweep a coutier breaks
Its upward lift a monarch makes!'