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[Page 11]
March 26
From Davidsons essay "On Poetry" in "Holiday and O.P.",
"Rhyme is a property of decadence: but decadence is always the manure and root of a higher manifestation of that art."
"The world will yet know more essential personalities than Buddha and Christ, greater men than Caesar and Napoleon, deeper passion and wider humanity than Shakespeare's, a music still more elemental than Wagner's, a sadder soul than Schopenhauer's, a more triumphant intellect than Nietzsche's, beauty more enthralling than Helen's."
"Blank verse is rude poetry, barbarous and beautiful, or athletic and refined, but always naked and unashamed."
T.B.S. announces new book of George Moore's, to be published presently, and of a book of Irish verse from Fisher Unwins. Will write to T.B.C. for both.
7.
Frank K. and Bib back from Paris and speak of shelling and of Amiens being heavily bombed & shelled, and Abbeville shelled.
Rumour takes the Boche to Pozieres, and on to Albert. If our flanks hold, and the rumour of the French bringing up new divisions, there should be shortly rumour of a coup.
8.
Start today at end of journal, a collecting of heard fragments.
9.
A night of full moon, and sharp frost-clearness, planes over and across and over, anti aircraft and M.G. tracer bullets.
There'll be long raiding tonight!
March 27
10.
Hand-to-hand fighting in Albert: Noyon won from the French, and 85,000 Boche cut off by the British and French. ("Lies, Lies, all lies!")
Yesterday paper admits "some tanks have been lost".
11.
This morning through Bailleul on Ambulance to 2nd C.C.S. Shelling has been directed only at the square, at the two tower buildings, the Church and the Hotel de Ville, the tower of the Hotel de Ville across the square, and each end of its buildings crushed in and wrecked to heaped debris, the organ loft, and aisle and nave roofing of the church jagged open where shells have landed, and the tall windows full of full of broken glass. Somehow the tower has stood: now it stands lonely across from the ruin of the Hotel de Ville.
The wrecked tower was not beautiful: but it was strangely typical of its builders, stolid and crowned by a fantastic belfry and tower, the small even old stonework of its lower building, till it lifted from the high steep roof to a deep frieze of bare brick tracing, full of quiet beauty, and contrasting well with the red brick of the building it rose from. The Café de la Marie, with its steep roof sweeping up to it, a heaped wreck by the tower ruins.
A colder day than yesterday: sky of even luminous grey, and fields brilliant under the clear light, a lovely loveliness and majesty about the Church's tower. Its bells should toll for Bailleul's useless destroying, there