Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 85]
name on a ticket, and pinned it on the blanket, and I've been trying to read Keats.
October 28
90.
Dressing Tent: 7.30 p.m.
'Lights out' sounded at six oclock, in all the camps hereabouts…then bombs dropped by one of the dumps…. Four men, artillery 105th Hant. Battery A hit, one killed: three we dressed and evacuated.
A long day of small dressings from a big sick parade.
The night cold, and misted: the moon tonight a cold full stain of pale gold. Phrases have been all night running through my mind… and the tall leaf losing poplars are lovely faint drawings in the mist.
"Skeleton trees rising soft from the mist,
That rise breast high from the ground…"
They are the makings of a word poem.
The moon made the phrase in a line,
The green-cold light of gold…
Harry asked me today – I received by mail four booklets of verse from Erskine Macdonald – when I was publishing my first book: towards it, today two phrases: the ones written in this entry.
Casualties last night, from the bombing across the road amongst the 2nd Battalion bivouacks were 15 killed, & about 60 wounded: here three died and others sent on to the A.D.S. were only sent – "given a sporting chance". All of us were out, and considering the working in mud, and only by faint hidden torchlight, the bandaging and fixing of the casualties worked finely and quickly. Back in the dugout, I tried to kill memory with the reading of Keats… I read The Odes – to the Nightingale and the 'Grecian Urn' – and lay full of imaginings not to be lost, and wrote a hatred in this diary.
91. October 29
Continued entry of Oct. 27 – 89 – and one of those characteristic words makes them indication….. "xxxxxxxx"!
The other means absolutely nothing-
I heard it a while ago used in its most full sense.
Some few reinforcements arriving late in Cairo, were sent straight out to Mena, instead of to Zeitoun