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[Page 47]
Oct. 12
would write if I were true to my inner feelings, but the writer of these letters was purely an artist, I am a dilettante.
My library holds Drinkwater's Poems, and Letters of a Soldier, and Brooke and Keats.
From Letters of a Soldier, letter of November 19, in the morning, up till then I had never imagined how different is the courage required by this kind of anonymous warfare from the traditional valour in war, as conceived by the civilian. And the clamour of this morning reminds me in the midst of my calm, that young men, without any personal motive of hate, can and must fling themselves upon those who are waiting to kill them. And from 'X = O' of Drinkwater, Salvious:
Nor strange: who goes in company with death,
Watching his daily desolation, thinking,
On every stroke, of all the agony
That from that stroke goes throbbing, throbbing, throbbing,
Forgets all hate. How should we hate the dead,
And when death ranges as amongst us now,
You, Pronax, I, and our antagonists
And friends alike are all but as dead men,
Moving together in a ghostly world,
With life a luckless beggar at the door.
48.
Between blankets, nailing rain against the Malthoid covering of the hut, and by candle light is playing poker over an improvised table. Archer reading in bed, and Wilk and some others out toward Ooderdoom.
Pay I drew 80 Francs, 30 will go to the T.B.C., 15 to Hendersons for the too long delayed orders for Poems of Alan Seeger and War Poems of Vernide.
Mail brought a letter from Elsie – newsy and of her new millinery venture by Grace's studio in King St… the Oct. 'To-Day', and Poems of Ralph Hodgson… the third impression. Yet they are unread but the first poem. The Gypsy Girl,
'A Man came up too loose of tongue
And said no good to her:
She did not blush as Saxons do,
Or turn upon the cur:
She fawned and whined "Sweet gentleman,
A penny for three tries!"
But oh, the den of wild things in
The darkness of her eyes.'
Clarrie had a note from Bert Reynolds – Blighty, and he doing well.
From [indecipherable]Les received a long letter of 9 pages from Basil – newsy – "To Mum and the Girls".
Bob has, it seems, lost my haversack of books – Masefield 1st edition of Martin Harvey, and a lot of Mother's letters.
Posted letters to Mat. & Court, square.