War Poets Podcast Revised Final Draft (With Notes)

© Kevin Childs 2020
WAR AND LOVE

Adapted for podcast by Kevin Childs
November 2020
1
SASSOON
The landscape looks grey and withered today – and the
poppies leap at you in harsh spots of flame, hectic and
cruel. Sometimes, when I see my companions sleeping,
rolled in their blankets, their faces turned to earth or
hidden by the folds, for a moment I wonder whether
they’re alive or dead. For at any hour I may come upon
them, and find that long silence descended over them, all
their hope and joy snuffed out for ever, and their voices
fading, from memory to memory, from hour to hour, until
they are gone.
They see me, Captain Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal

Welch Fusiliers, in the sunshine when I must acquiesce to
the evil that is war. But in the darkness of the night my
soul goes down into the valley of death, and my feet move
among the graves of dead youth. Stiffy, grey-eyed and
sensible and shrewd; Jowett, dark-eyed and lover-like and
wistful; how long have you to live, you, in the perfection of
youth, your pride of living, your ignorance of life’s
narrowing road? Oh let my pity be poured out upon you;
let my love be spent to make yours more happy. And if
you must die, and I be left alone, let me be strong to
endure the injustice.
This is how a poet is made, through love and war: the

longing, the feeling, the lust, the rage, the despair. Isn’t
love in the red mouths and red wounds and pale young
faces peering out from under steel hats? Isn’t it the
winding of puttees over a strong calf, the muddy fingers
running through dirty blond hair, the clear blue eyes half-
lidded over a smile, smile, smile? Above all isn’t it in the
boy who died last night laying new wire across No-Mans-
Land?
2
Charles Sorley, only twenty, was one of those young

men …
SORLEY
Only, I think, once or twice do you stumble across that
person into whom you fit at once: before whom you can
stand naked, all disclosed.
SASSOON
For much of his time in the trenches in 1915, Sorley
wasn’t sure he was up to the awful job he’d been given,
commanding men in battle, and he wanted nothing
better than to be with Arthur Watts, whom he’d met
and spent a glorious summer with in Germany only a
year earlier, an Englishman abroad then, now an
intelligence officer at the War Office, who’d become the
one ‘into whom one fits at once’.
SORLEY
There’s something rotten in the state of something. I
feel it but cannot be definite of what. Not even is there
the premonition of something big impending: gathering
and ready to burst. Mutual helplessness and lassitude,
as when two boxers who have battered each other
crouch, waiting for the other to hit.
So one lives in a year ago — and a year hence. What

are your feet doing a year hence, my dearest Arthur?
For that feeling of stoniness, “too-old-at-fortyness,” and
late afternoon of which you speak, is only you among
strangers, you in Babylon: you were forty when I first
saw you: thirty, donnish, and well-mannered when you
first asked me to tea: but later, at tennis, you were any
age: you will be always forty to strangers perhaps. And
after all, friends are the same age.
3
There is really very little to say about the life here. Change
of circumstance, I find, means little compared to change
of company. They are extraordinarily close, really, these
friendships of circumstance, distinct as they remain from
friendships of choice. I’m sure that any gathering of men
will lead to a very, very close friendship between them all.
So there has really been no change in coming over here:
the change is to come when half of this improvised " band
of brothers " are wiped away in a day. We are learning to
be soldiers slowly, that is to say, adopting the soldierly
attitude of complete disconnection with our job during odd
hours. No shop. So when I think I should tell you
"something about the trenches", I find I have neither the
inclination nor the power.
SASSOON
But what encouraged us, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen,
Poor Ivor Gurney and even Sorley, and kept us going,
returning to the trenches when there was strictly no
need or defying the cant of stay-at-home warriors, if not
our capacity for love? Edward Carpenter, that prophet
of homosexual liberation, had told us how homosexuals
were set apart with particular gifts for art and poetry,
their role to teach the world to love. We all read this
and believed it. It was our purpose, our right, if you will,
to crystallise that love, and poetry was still the
language of love in 1916.
OWEN
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded by my stead!
4
Your slender attitude

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
Your voice sings not so soft –

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft –
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.
Heart, you were never hot

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.
SASSOON
Little Wilfred Owen. I did love the fellow. Hardly a
gentleman, but the finest poet of them all. A Keats of
the trenches, I suppose, who was always so terribly
concerned about what others thought, he sometimes
missed his own genius.
OWEN
When I came in from work at 4 o’clock – I had no idea it
was Sunday, it often happens so – Captain Sorrel gave
me the choice of writing a Sonnet before 7.30 or going
with the next Fatigue Party!! I am ever so happy to be
with him. He chokes filthiness as summarily as I ever
heard a Captain do, or try to do. He is himself an
aesthete, and not virtuous according to English
5
standards, perhaps, but no man swears in his presence,

nor broaches those pleasantries which so amuse the
English officer’s mind. He seems to be one of the few
young men who live up to my principle: that
Amusement is never an excuse for ‘immorality’, but
that Passion may be so.
SASSOON
Owen was a watcher, an intercessor who wanted to tell
the stories of the men who fought and suffered. Sorley,
I think, was a very different creature, a sensualist in the
body of a young puritan, with no belief in anything
other than what his fingers, his tongue, his eyes told
him, the wind, the rain, the taste of a particular meal,
greedy for it.
SORLEY
Just a line, my dearest Arthur, albeit on military ruled
paper. It is the eve of our crowning hour. I am bleached
with chalk and grown hairy.
And I think exultantly and sweetly of the one or two or

three outstandingly admirable meals of my life. One in
Yorkshire, in an inn upon the moors, with a fire of logs
and ale and tea and every sort of Yorkshire bakery,
especially bears me company. And yet another in
Germany (where they are very English) in a farmhouse
utterly at peace in broad fields sloping to the sea. I
remember a tureen of champagne in the middle of the
table, to which we helped ourselves with ladles! I
remember my hunger after three hours' ride over the
country: and the fishing-town lying like an English town
on the sea. In that great old farm-house where I dined
at 3 p.m. as the May day began to cool, fruit of sea and
of land joined hands together, fish fresh caught and
6
ducks fresh killed: it was a wedding of the elements. It

was perhaps the greatest meal I have had ever, for
everything we ate had been alive that morning, the
champagne was alive yet. 'Twas Homeric and its
memory fills many hungry hours.
SASSOON
Someone wrote to Sorley’s father after the young poet
was killed in an action near Loos late in 1915 – the
usual fiasco as a delay between the necessary
bombardment and the order for officers to blow their
whistles meant that going over the top became a
charge into rapidly thinning smoke and deadly machine
gun fire. Sorley’s commanding officer fell, and Sorley
tried to rally his men, but for a moment a sniper had his
fine head in his sights and the young poet dropped
dead. His body was never found. Well this unknown
officer at the front had read the collection of poetry
Sorley’s father had published, in memoriam so to
speak, and he was haunted with a sense of personal
loss, though he didn’t know the boy. A poem was found
in Sorley’s kit bag, perfect. His last.
SORLEY
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
No tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
7
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
GRAVES
I’ve just discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorley
whose poems have just appeared in the Cambridge
Press (Marlborough and Other Poems, 3s. 6d.) and who
was killed near Loos on October 13th as a temporary
captain in the 7th Suffolk Regiment. It seems ridiculous
to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself
doing but he seems to have been one so entirely after
my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having
been just my own age and having spent just the same
years at Marlboro’ as I spent at Charterhouse. He got a
classical scholarship at University College, Oxford, the
same year as I was up and I half-remember meeting
him there.
SASSOON
Robert Graves once asked me if I thought that Sorley
was ‘so’, meaning, I suppose, homosexual. He wrote no
conventional lyrics, he said, and it reminded me of
something a wounded officer once asked me about my
poetry, why there were no women in it. I said they
didn’t fit with my philosophy. But Graves soon caught
the potential of Sorley’s poetry, it’s modernity and
passionate disavowal of hatred.
SORLEY
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,
A merciful putting away of what has been.
8
And this we know: Death is not Life effete,

Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen
So marvellous things know well the end not yet.
Victor and vanquished are a-one in death:

Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say
‘Come, what was your record when you drew breath?’
But a big blot has hid each yesterday
So poor, so manifestly incomplete.
And your bright Promise, withered long and sped,
Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead.
SASSOON
Rupert Brooke was another of the war’s pinup, the
original in fact. Saint Sebastian in khaki. His beauty
undiminished by cropped hair and military tailoring, his
tremendous popularity at home and at the Front, the
unabashed sensuality of his final publication, 1914 and
Other Poems, greeted at the time with almost delirious
abandon, are what have made him so hated by critics
ever since.
BROOKE
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain,
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
9
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
SASSOON
I didn’t know Brooke at Cambridge, though my poor
brother Hamo did. I met him once, just before war broke
out, at breakfast in Eddie Marsh’s rooms in London. I was
tongue-tied, he was the epitome of the poet, ‘his flashing
eyes, his floating hair’. I think he humoured me, and I had
the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he didn’t find me
attractive.
BROOKE
Occasionally I’m faintly shaken by a suspicion that I might
find incredible beauty in the washing place, with rows of
naked, superb men bathing in a September sun or in the
Camp at night under a full moon, faint lights burning
through the ghostly tents, & a distant bugler
blowing Lights Out – if only I were sensitive. But I’m not.
I’m a warrior. So I think of nothing and go to bed.
OWEN
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
10
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?
SASSOON
Tonight I am hungry for music. And still the guns boom;
and the battle goes on three miles away. And Graves is
somewhere in it, if he hasn’t been shot already. Blighty! –
what a world of idle nothingness the name stands for; and
what a world of familiar delightfulness! O God, when shall
I get out of this limbo? For I’m never alone here – never
my old self – always acting a part – that of the cheery,
reckless sportsman – out for a dip at the Bosches. But the
men love me, and that’s one great consolation. And some
day perhaps I’ll be alone in a roomful of books again, with
a piano glimmering in the corner, and glory in my head,
and a new poem in my workbook. Now the rain begins to
patter on the tent and the dull thudding of the guns comes
from Albert way; and I’ve still got my terrible way to tread
before I’m free to sleep with Rupert Brooke and Sorley,
and all the nameless poets of the war.
***********
[THERE WILL BE SOME SORT OF INTERLUDE HERE
TO SUGGEST A CHANGE OF TIME AND TONE –
POSSIBLY SOME OF GURNEY’S MUSIC]
GRAVES
David Thomas was a young lieutenant in the Welch
Fusiliers. Blond, beautiful, an athlete who devoured poems
like a hungry lion cub. I always remarked that Tommy
should take more care of himself. Whenever he was sent
on patrol, he’d stay out nearly an hour and a half, going
right up to the Bosch wire.
11
SASSOON
One day, David and I rode over the rolling uplands and
through an occasional strip of woodland, with the sun
shining and big clouds moving prosperously on a
boisterous north-west wind. We rode to a village six or
seven miles away and had tea at an unbelievable shop
where the cakes were as goods as anything in Amiens. I
wouldn’t like to say how many we ate, but the evening
star shone benevolently down on us from among a drift of
rosy clouds while we were cantering home to Morlancourt.
I glanced at David and thought what a young Galahad he
looked.
GURNEY
Last night — O lucky me! — a Scottish Rifle sat up besides
the stove with me, which glowed and made believe it was
a fire. And he had travelled and could talk, and we had the
same politics and the same tastes. His eyes were steady,
his laugh open and easily provoked, and a smile that could
not be long checked being chiefly an affair of the eyes. O
well, it must have been 12.30 when we illicitly walked
under the stars, watching Orion and hearing his huge,
sustained chord…
SASSOON
That is Ivor Gurney, a private soldier in the Gloucesters. I
never knowingly encountered him during the war. He
groped through life under a blanket of sadness, a fine
musician, a poet of the countryside transplanted to the
city and then to the hell of total warfare, inspired by
snatches of moonlight through trees and the wind on the
plains of Picardy, which so reminded him of the Severn
valley. When we were idle in our minds, amongst the
sandbags and falling bombs, Gurney composed beautiful
songs with a bit of pencil on a tattered notebook. Will
12
Harvey, who met Gurney at school in Gloucester, became

the object of his passions and the muse of his poetry,
including an early rhapsodic sunset walk, remembered
later in a supply line trench in France.
GURNEY
Out of the smoke and dust of the little room
With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,
I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise
Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,
To wonder at the miracle hanging high
Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.
Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were
Once more at home together, you and I.
The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade

Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,
One soul uprapt; and still another fire
Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:
That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one
The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.
SORELY
We are the homeless, even as you,
Who hope and never can begin.
Our hearts are wounded through and through
Like yours, but our hearts bleed within.
We too make music, but our tones
‘Scape not the barrier of our bones.
We have no comeliness like you.

We toil, unlovely, and we spin.
We start, return: we wind, undo:
We hope, we err, we strive, we sin,
We love: your love’s not greater, but
13
The lips of our love’s might stay shut.
We have the evil spirits too

That shake our soul with battle-din.
We have an eviller spirit than you,
We have a dumb spirit within:
The exceeding bitter agony
But not the exceeding bitter cry.
SASSOON
Maybe Charles Sorley was too young to feel the true
bitterness of love. But not too young to know that some
loves could never be sung from the hill tops. God knows I
have wanted to, but I remained as chaste as Galahad
throughout the conflict. Mine eyes feasted. My body did
not. It took a Rupert Brooke, with the confidence of a god,
to brag about that kind of love. Writing before the war to
James Strachey, who’d been in love with him for ever, he
gave an account of his first sexual encounter.
BROOKE
We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax … At the
right moment I, as planned, said ‘Come into my room, it’s
better there…’. I suppose Denham knew what I meant.
Anyhow he followed me. In that larger bed it was cold; we
clung together. Intentions became plain: but still nothing
was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to
slip my pyjamas. His was the woman’s part throughout. I
had to make him take his off – do it for him. There it was
purely body to body – my first, you know!
I was still a little frightened of his, at any too sudden step,

bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little…
face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he
touched once with his fingers: and that made me shiver so
much I think he was frightened. But with alternate
14
stirrings, and still pressure, we mounted. My right hand

got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and
pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be
noticeable. At length we took to rolling to & fro over each
other, in the excitement… the waves grew more terrific:
my control of the situation was over; I treated him with
the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but
incessantly, responded. Half under him & half over, I came
off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have
never been sure. A silent moment: & then he slipped away
to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other
‘Good-night’. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a
dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it clear as I could, and
left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower
part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the
wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that
this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to
Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I
hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was
sleeping.
SASSOON
He wasn’t entirely showing off, but with a kind of strange
premonition of the death awaiting millions of young men,
Brooke was writing exactly the sort of letter it would fall to
my lot to send when a man in my platoon had taken a
bullet for King and Country. But this was a sudden death
outside of wartime.
BROOKE
So you’ll understand it was – not with a shock, for I’m far
too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and
dizzy discomfort – that I heard that Denham died at one
o’clock on Wednesday morning, - just twenty-four hours
ago now.
15
SASSOON
Graves was feeling nostalgic for his school days at
Charterhouse that spring and the love of his life: Peter.
The thought of that ideal youth was what kept him going
amid the horror and the blood-soaked mud, I believe.
GRAVES
I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and the yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.
Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack

In these soul-deadening trenches – pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And peace, and all that’s good.
SASSOON
Riding out to the trenches, the sky at 6.30 was angry with
a red smoky sunset; the village loomed against the glow;
it was a sultry, threatening dusk. But when I came home
at 10 o’clock everything was covered with exquisite
moonlight. A great star hung over Morlancourt,
unbelievably bright in the pale azure heavens.
This morning came the evil news from the trenches, first
that Richardson had died of wounds after being knocked
over by a shell last night in front of the trenches; this was
bad. But they came afterwards and told me that my little
David had been hit by a stray bullet and died last night.
16
GRAVES
I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been
in France, but it did not anger me as it did Siegfried. He
was acting transport-officer and every evening now, when
he came up with the rations, went out on patrol looking for
Germans to kill. I just felt empty and lost.
SASSOON
When last I saw David two nights ago, he had this
notebook in his hand, reading my last poem. And I said
goodnight to him in the moonlit trenches. Had I but
known! – the old human-weak cry. Now he comes back to
me in memories, like an angel with the light in his yellow
hair.
So after lunch I escaped to the woods, and grief had its

way with me in the sultry thicket. And I lay under the
smooth bole of a birch tree, wondering, and longing for
the bodily presence that was so fair. So I wrote his name
in chalk on the birch tree stem and left a rough garland of
ivy there and a yellow primrose, for his yellow hair and
kind grey eyes, my dear, my dear.
GRAVES
Walking through trees to cool my heat and pain,
I know that David’s with me here again.
All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
Caressingly I stroke
Rough bark of the friendly oak.
A brook goes bubbling by: the voice is his.

Turf burns with pleasant smoke;
I laugh at chaffinch and at primroses.
All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
Over the whole wood in a little while
Breaks his slow smile.
17
SASSOON
Ah! but there was no need to call his name.
He was beside me now, as swift as light.
I knew him crushed to earth in scentless flowers,
And lifted in the rapture of dark pines.
‘For now,’ he said, ‘my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars; and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,
And dawn and sunset flame with my spilt blood.
My breath is the great wind, and I am filled
With molten power and surge of the bright waves
That chant my doom along the ocean’s edge.’
My heart is fooled with fancies, being wise;

For fancy is the gleaming of wet flowers
When the hid sun looks forth with golden stare.
Thus, when I find new loveliness to praise,
And things long-known shine out in sudden grace,
Then will I think: ‘He moves before me now.’
So he will never come but in delight,
And, as it was in life, his name shall be
Wonder awaking in a summer dawn,
And youth, that dying, touched my lips to song.
GURNEY
The thing that fills my mind most is that Willy Harvey, my
best friend, went out on patrol a week ago, and never
came back. It does not make very much difference: for
two years I have had only the most fleeting glimpses of
him, but we were firm enough in love, and I do not look
ever for a closer bond, though I live long and am as lucky
in friendship as heretofore. He was full of unsatisfied
longings. A Doctor would have called it neurasthenia, but
that term covers many things, and in him it meant partly
an idealism that could not be contented with realities. His
18
ordinary look was gloomy, but on being spoken to, he

gladdened one with the most beautiful of smiles, and all
who knew him and understood him must not only have
liked him merely, but loved him. Had he lived, a great
poet might have developed from him, could he only obtain
the gift of serenity. As a soldier, or rather as I would say, a
man, he was dauntlessly brave, and bravery in others
stirred him not only to the most generous recognition, but
also unfortunately to an insatiable desire to surpass that.
His desire for nobility and sacrifice was insatiable and was
at last his doom, but his friends may be excused for
desiring a better ending than that probable, of a sniper’s
bullet in No Man’s Land; if the Fates send that I live to a
great age and attain fulness of days and honour, nothing
can alter my memory of him or the evenings we spent
together. All firelit frosty evenings will be full of him, and
the perfectest evening of Autumn will but recall him the
more vividly to my memory. And if I have the good fortune
ever to meet with such another, he has a golden memory
to contend with.
SASSOON
Harvey was captured by the Germans when his patrol
strayed too close to their lines. He wasn’t dead. He’d
eventually escape. At about the same time I heard that
poor Robert Graves had been killed during that endless
carnage known as the Battle of the Somme. So I go my
way alone again.
GRAVES
My dear Sassons,
I hope you haven’t taken the casualty lists seriously again.

They are fools. I’m right as rain and hope before many
days to be up in glorious Merioneth again basking in the
19
sun and storing up a large mass of solar energy

against our great Caucasus trip après la guerre. The
rumour of my death was started by the regimental
doctor and the Field Ambulance one swearing I couldn’t
possibly live – but it takes a lot to kill Youth and Ugliness
however easily Youth and Beauty fade and die. Tibs has
written me a ripping letter apologizing about the mistake.
Eddie tells me you were quite sad about my demise – dear

old thing, I hope you didn’t avenge me with bombs or do
anything rash!
GURNEY
He's gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body that was so quick

Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
You would not know him now…

But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!

And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers –
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
20
*************
ANOTHER INTERLUDE BREAK WITH MUSIC
SASSOON
To these I turn, in these I trust—
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.
GURNEY
The machine guns are the most terrifying sound, like an
awful pack of hell hounds at one’s back. It left me exulted
and exulting… I am tired of this war, it bores me; but I
would not willingly give up such a memory of such a time.
Everything went wrong, and there was a tiny pause at first
– but everybody, save the officers, were doing what they
ought to do and settled down later to the proper job.
War’s damned interesting! It would be hard indeed to be

deprived of all this artist’s material now.
SASSOON
Gurney was right. I wanted my own genuine taste of the
horrors, and then – peace. I didn’t want to go back to the
old inane life which always seemed like a prison. I wanted
21
freedom, not comfort. I have seen beauty in life, in men

and things; but I can never be a great poet, or a great
lover, for I have met such. I met Wilfred Owen at
Craiglockhart Hospital outside Edinburgh in the summer of
1917. I was there because, after months of raging and
lobbing grenades at German patrols in the hope of killing
enough to make up for the death of one, my poor David, I
was mad enough to object to the conduct of the war in its
entirety, in print, throwing my MC medal in the Mersey for
good measure. Owen was there because he was… well… a
little mad.
OWEN
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
SASSOON
Owen’s doctor had suggested he explore his feelings in
verse. He was a little too in love with the old ways then –
and with himself – so I suggested he read Sorley and
suggested changes to some of his more purple passages,
and introduced him to Graves, and Churchill’s flamboyant
secretary, Eddie Marsh, and Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s
22
old lover, and all the glorious iniquity of London. Mea

culpa.
OWEN
Dearest of all Friends, here is an address which will serve
for a few days. The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the
waves are dancing fast & bright... But these are not Lines
written in Dejection. Serenity Shelley never dreamed of
crowns me. Will it last when I shall have gone into Caverns
& Abysmals such as he never reserved for his worst
daemons? Yesterday I went down to Folkestone Beach and
into the sea, thinking to go through those stanzas &
emotions of Shelley’s to the full. But I was too happy, or
the Sun was too supreme. Moreover there issued from the
sea distraction, in the shape, Shape I say, but lay no stress
on that, of a Harrow boy, of superb intellect & refinement;
intellect because he hates war more than Germans;
refinement because of the way he spoke of my Going, and
of the Sun, and of the Sea there; and the way he spoke of
Everything. In fact, the way he spoke.
Tell me how you are. With great & painful firmness I have
not said you goodbye from England. If you had said in the
heart or brain you might have stabbed me, but you said
only in the leg; so I was afraid. Perhaps if I ‘write’ anything
in dug-outs or talk in my sleep a squad of riflemen will
save you the trouble of buying a dagger.
SASSOON
It’s as if we just couldn’t keep away. Even my refusal to
report for duty, the letter of resignation in The Times, all
that fuss, led to very little – weeks of chatting to Dr Rivers
by a Scottish loch and a renewed determination to do my
bit for the men to the very end. But meeting with little
23
Wilfred Owen, that was one of the great moments of my

life.
OWEN
I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the dripping slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.
Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,

And eyes tumultuous as the gems
Of moons and lamps in the lapping Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the pool.
Shuddering the purple street-arc burns

Where I watch always; from the banks
Dolorously, the shipping clanks,
And after me a strange tide turns.
I walk till the stars of London wane

And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.
But when the crowing syrens blare
I with another ghost am lain.
BROOKE
There are moments – there have been several, especially in
the Aegean – when, through some beauty of sky and air
and earth, some harmony of the mind, peace is complete
and completely satisfying. And there are men who seem to
do what one so terribly can’t, and so terribly, at these
moments, aches to do – store up reservoirs of this calm and
content, fill and seal great jars or pitchers during these half
hours, and draw on them at later moments, when the
source isn’t there, but the need is very great.
SASSOON
24
On his way to the Dardanelles, Rupert Brook had become

quite morbid, like all of us, and death, or rather death in
battle occupied his thoughts, almost crowding out
thoughts of love and the reasons why he was there in the
first place: confusion about his life, his loves, the love of
the young men around him; the sense that he was on his
way to his own Troy, sailing the seas Odysseus and
Achilles had known. He wrote what would be his last
verses – far from the certainty of his famous sonnets – on
the troop ship taking him to Gallipoli.
BROOKE
I strayed about the deck, an hour, tonight
Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped
In at windows, watched my friends at table,
Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,
Or coming out into the darkness. Still
No one could see me.
I would have thought them

Heedless, within a week of battle – in pity,
Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness
And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that
This gay machine of splendour’ld soon be broken,
Thought little of, pashed, scattered…
Only, always,
I could but see them – against the lamplight – pass
Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,
Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,
That broke to phosphorus out in the night,
Perishing things and strange ghosts – soon to die
To other ghosts – this one, or that, or I.
SASSOON
25
It was off Skyros, Achilles’ isle where the hero had been
hidden by his mother to keep him from the Trojan War and
an early death, that Brooke was stretchered into a small
boat and rowed to a hospital ship. He was suffering from
blood poisoning, probably caused by an infected mosquito
bite. Opening his eyes feebly for the last time, ‘Hello’ he
said to Denis Browne, his oldest and dearest friend who,
like Patroclus to Brooke’s Achilles, had followed him into
the same regiment and the same theatre of war and
would soon follow through the ‘unknown door’. Browne
and others would bury him on Skyros a day or so later.
SORELY
He was far too obsessed with his own sacrifice regarding
the going to war of himself (and others), as a highly
intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is
merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the
turn of circumstances. But then the drama of his going
was so irresistible I suppose. Soldiers with torches lining
the rough footpath. Burly Australians carrying his coffin,
covered in palm fronds, the martyr’s palm, and the Union
flag. Lanterns, a wooden cross cut that day by men from
Brooke’s platoon, a firing party and friends under a
drifting moon reached the spot, beneath a drooping olive
tree, where he was to be laid in Achilles’ earth. The lamps
flared in a sudden breeze, sage and thyme and mint
mingling. The old Greek divinities stirring from their long
sleep.
BROOKE
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
26
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! We, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
GRAVES
It is only fair to tell you that since the cataclysm of my
friend Peter, my affections are running in the more normal
channels and I correspond regularly and warmly with
Nancy Nicholson, who is great fun. I only tell you this so
you should get out of your head any misconceptions of my
temperament. I should hate you to think I was a confirmed
homosexual even if it were only in my thought and went
no farther.
SASSOON
Poor Peter, he’d been caught with a Canadian soldier at
the school gates one evening and someone, a cousin or
other, unkindly thought to let Robert Graves know. I don’t
think he ever got over it. I couldn’t go to his and Nancy
Nicholson’s wedding in January 1918. I was still doing my
penance for flirting with pacifism. I thought it a little too
precipitate, though. Owen went and said it was an odd
affair and Nancy an odd girl – ‘pretty, but nowise
handsome, more like a boy’, he said. But Owen had his
own preoccupations then.
OWEN
My dear Sassoon, When I had opened your envelope in a
quiet comer of the Club Staircase, I sat on the stairs and
27
groaned a little, and then went up and oosed off a gourd,

a Gothic vacuum of a letter, which I ‘put by’ (as you would
recommend for such effusions) until I could think over the
thing. I have also waited for this photograph.
I imagined you were entrusting me with some holy secret

concerning yourself. A secret, however, it shall be until
such time as I shall have climbed to the housetops, and
you to the minarets of the world. This Fact has not
intensified my feelings for you by the least. Know that
since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a
tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats +
Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor +
Amenophis IV in profile. What’s that mathematically? In
effect it is this: that I love you, dispassionately, so much,
so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile
you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least. And
you have fixed my Life — however short. You did not light
me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I
spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing
out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze. It is
some consolation to know that Jupiter himself sometimes
swims out of Ken!
GURNEY
Rain there was – tired and weak I was, glad for an
end.
But one spoke to me – one I liked well as a friend,
‘Let volunteer for the Front Line – many others
won’t.’
‘I’ll volunteer, it’s better being there than here.’
But I had seen too many ditches and stood too long
Feeling my feet freeze, and my shoulders ache with
the strong
28
Pull of equipment, and too much use of pain and

strain.
Besides, he was a Lance Corporal and might be full
Corporal
Before the next straw resting might come again,
Before the next billet should hum with talk and song.
Stars looked as well from second as from first line
holes.
**********
ANOTHER INTERLUDE, ANOTHER MOOD CHANGE.
SORLEY
England, I am sick of the sound of the word! In training to
fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate
hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and
appalling ‘imaginative indolence’ that has marked us out
from generation to generation. Goliath and Caiaphas, the
philistine and the Pharisee, pound these together and
there you have Suburbia and Westminster and Fleet
Street.
SASSOON
Youth is a terrible burden, at least for someone like
Charles Sorley; a baggage of promise and perfection and
fine blood that doesn’t always come off. We were, of
necessity, young, some like Sorley and Graves terribly
young, but then war was a young man’s business. A great
many were bound to die. There’s a sort of crass
inevitability about it. It is pitiful for a young man to die, in
the horror of battle, in a cold, drenched trench, but it is
29
also a glorious sacrifice too, so says Brooke, so says

Sorley, who had no truck with jingoism.
SORELY
I dread my own censorious self in the coming conflict. I
also have great physical dread of pain. Still, a good edge
is given to the sword here. And one learns to be a servant.
The soul is disciplined. So much for me. But the good it
would do in your case, my dear Arthur, is that it would
discipline your liver. The first need of man is health. And I
wish it you for your happiness, though somehow, I seem
to know you more closely when you are fighting a well-
fought battle with ill-health.
Adieu! or (chances three to one in favour of the

pleasanter alternative) auf wiedersehen! Pray that I ride
my frisky nerves with a cool and steady hand when the
time arrives. And you don't know how much I long for
our next meeting!
OWEN
Not this week nor this month dare I lie down
In languor under lime trees or smooth smile.
Love must not kiss my face pale that is brown.
My lips, panting, shall drink space, mile by mile;

Strong meats be all my hunger; my renown
Be the clean beauty of speed and pride of style.
Cold winds encountered on the racing Down

Shall thrill my heated bareness; but awhile
None else may meet me till I wear my crown.
SASSOON
Like little Owen, I was still determined to go back and
fight. The angry, arrogant, secret pride of youth saying,
“I’ll go back and get killed” – just to spite these old men.
30
The whole thing is a combination of sex-repression, war-

weariness, vanity and pride – with a little ‘decent feeling’
and touch of nerves chucked in. A war-cocktail. And above
all – that eternal, insane hankering for death.
One day I will write something. It is to be one of the

stepping-stones across the raging (or lethargic) river of
intolerance which divides creatures of my temperament
from a free and unsecretive existence among their fellow
men. A mere self-revelation, however spontaneous and
clearly-expressed, can never achieve as much as – well,
imagine another Madame Bovary dealing with sexual
inversion, a book that the world must recognise and learn
to understand. Until then, secrets.
OWEN
My dearest Siegfried, someday, I must tell how we sang,
shouted, whistled and danced through the dark lanes
through Colinton; and how we laughed till the meteors
showered around us, and we fell calm under the winter
stars. And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for
the first time. And seeing it so far above us, and feeling
the good road so safe beneath us, we knew we loved one
another as no men love for long. Which, if the Bridge-
players Craig & Lockhart could have seen, they would
have called down the wrath of Jahveh, and buried us
under the fires of the City you wot of. To which also it is
time you committed this letter. I wish you were less
undemonstrative, for I have many adjectives with which to
qualify myself. As it is, I can only say I am your proud
friend, Owen.
SASSOON
I never asked you to be perfect—did I?—
Though often I’ve called you sweet, in the invasion
31
Of mastering love. I never prayed that you

Might stand, unsoiled, angelic and inhuman,
Pointing the way toward Sainthood like a sign-post.
Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy.

We found the little kingdom of our passion
That all can share who walk the road of lovers.
In wild and secret happiness we stumbled;
And gods and demons clamoured in our senses.
But I’ve grown thoughtful now. And you have lost

Your early-morning freshness of surprise
At being so utterly mine: you’ve learned to fear
The gloomy, stricken places in my soul,
And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.
You dream long liturgies of our devotion.

Yet, in my heart, I dread our love’s destruction.
But, should you grow to hate me, I would ask
No mercy of your mood: I’d have you stand
And look me in the eyes, and laugh, and smite me.
Then I should know, at least, that truth endured,

Though love had died of wounds. And you could
leave me
Unvanquished in my atmosphere of devils.
GURNEY
Why does this war of spirit take on such dread forms of
ugliness, and why should a high triumph be signified by a
body shattered, black, stinking; avoided by day, stumbled
over by night, and offence to the hardest? What
consolation can be given me as I look upon and endure it?
Any? Sufficient? The ‘End of War’? Who knows, for the
thing for which so great a price is paid is yet doubtful and
obscure. God should have done better for us that this;
32
could He not have found some better, milder way of

changing the Prussian (whom he made) than by the
breaking of such beautiful souls? Now that is what one
should write poetry upon. I have made a book about
Beauty because I have paid the price which five years ago
had not been paid.
SASSOON
Gassed out of the line in September 1917, Ivor Gurney’s
war was over, until one day he walked into a police station
and asked for a gun with which to kills himself, saying he
was a criminal who deserved it. His crime? Loving too
much? It seems his war was never really over.
GURNEY
There are strange Hells within the minds War made
Not so often, not so humiliating afraid
As one would have expected - the racket and fear guns made.
One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;

Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout
Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked low their heads
And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,
That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;
"Apres la guerre fini" till Hell all had come down,
Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen pounders hammering Hell's
thunders.
Where are they now? On State-doles or showing shop patterns

Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns
Or begged. Some civic routine one never learns.
The heart burns - but has to keep out of face how heart burns.
SORELY
Welcome Gurney, good Gurney. You’ve been broken on
the wheel a long time. But you’re welcome here now.
Benching on the Embankment, dripping hedgerow sleeps,
33
you’ve lived beneath a suffocation of Dartford hospital

beds and steel-eyed orderlies for too long.
BROOKE
We have found safety with all things undying, here, the
winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth and sleep,
and freedom, and the autumnal earth. We have gained a
peace unshaken by pain for ever.
And for your love and your music, Gurney, for which I
thank you, safe shall be your going there, safe though all
safety’s lost; safe where men fall; And now your poor
limbs die, safest of all.
SORLEY
You have been out in front at night in that no-man's land
and long graveyard long enough. There is a freedom and a
spur here and death and the horrible thankfulness: unseen
hands hauling in the great resistless body in the dark,
your poor, smashed head rattling: the relief, the relief that
what has made the musician an animal has now made the
animal a corpse, purged of all false pity, perhaps more
selfish than before, but god-like now in your knowingness.
GRAVES
After fifteen years in an asylum in Kent, a victim of the
War, of cruelty, of neglect, Ivor Gurney effectively starved
to death in 1937. He left behind some of the finest music
written by an Englishman in those years and some of the
War’s truest poetry, forgotten now, dropped like an
unwanted flyer, full of strange fancies, snatches of love
and beauty and horror and a longing to know what lies
beyond. He would sit for hours with a map of
Gloucestershire, tracing favourite walks with a finger,
longing for escape. They said if he went back, he might kill
34
himself, but oh! for even an hour of humane bliss, of joy in

beauty before he did so.
SORLEY
Death drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs' glory,
Death makes justice a dream, and strength a traveller's story.
Death drives the lovely soul to wander under the sky.
Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
OWEN
My dear Siegfried, the Battalion had a sheer time last
week. It is a strange truth: that your Counter-Attack
frightened me much more than the real one: though the
boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me,
soaking my shoulder for half an hour.
Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-

hot iron as it cools from the smelting? That is what Jones’s
blood looked like, and felt like. My senses are charred.
I shall feel again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I

don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write
Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write
Deceased over many books.
I’m glad I’ve been recommended for MC. Full of

confidence after having taken a few machine guns (with
the help of one seraphic lance corporal), I held a most
glorious brief peace talk in a pill box. You would have been
en pamoisons, all in a swoon.
GRAVES
On Armistice day I learned that Owen had been killed.
About a week before he was shot dead crossing a dank
canal, just as his MC came through. So many dead, and
Graves survives to say goodbye to all that.
35
I suppose most of Owen’s poetry, most war poetry was

very frequently due to an insupportable conflict between
suppressed instincts of love and fear; the officer’s actual
love which he could never openly show for the boys he
commanded and the fear of the horrible death that
threatened them all. My poems were journalistic. Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen were homosexuals; though Sassoon
tried to think he wasn’t. To them seeing men killed was as
horrible as if you and I had to see fields of corpses of
women.
GURNEY
Oh the joy! I crawled into a dugout, not high but fairly
large, lit by a candle, and so met four of the most
delightful young men that could be met anywhere. Thin-
faced and bright eyed, their faces showed beautifully
against the soft glow of the candlelight and their musical
voices delightful after the long march at attention in
silence. We talked… of Welsh folksong, of George
Burrows, of Burns, of the RCM; of – yes – of Oscar Wilde,
Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare. They spoke of their
friends dead or maimed in the bombardment. I sat there
and gave them all my love, for their tenderness, their
steadfastness and kindness to raw fighters and very raw
signallers.
Once we were standing outside our dugout cleaning mess

tins, when a cuckoo sounded its call from the shattered
wood at the back. This Welshman turned to me
passionately, “Listen to that damned bird,” he said. “All
through that bombardment in the pauses I could hear that
infernal silly ‘Cuckoo, Cuckoo’ sounding while Owen was
lying in my arms covered with blood. How shall I ever
listen again…!” He broke off, and I became aware of
36
shame at the unholy joy that filled my artist’s mind. And

what a fine thin keen face he had, and what a voice.
SASSOON
In detail is grandeur. The cuckoo’s call, the herald of
Spring, is the harbinger of death and a germ of something
in an artist’s mind. Small things stand in for the
panorama, the individual for the millions, a ghost for the
dead.
Those four years of blood and love in war were the

branding that marked us for good, feelings so sheer
spilling into poetry that changed poetry in English and
blighted war forever. We have little time before the blood
slows and recollection wanes. A hundred years ago and as
remembrance ends, it isn’t so much the horror of war, the
details of blown-off limbs, bullet wounds and filthy mud, as
that intense love, that intenser sacrifice, which ought to,
which still speaks clearly.
OWEN
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
37
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”
THE END
38

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© Kevin Childs 2020

WAR AND LOVE

They see me, Captain Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal

This is how a poet is made, through love and war: the

Charles Sorley, only twenty, was one of those young

So one lives in a year ago — and a year hence. What

Your slender attitude

Your voice sings not so soft –

Heart, you were never hot

standards, perhaps, but no man swears in his presence,

And I think exultantly and sweetly of the one or two or

ducks fresh killed: it was a wedding of the elements. It

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

And this we know: Death is not Life effete,

Victor and vanquished are a-one in death:

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

Think how it wakes the seeds—

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

Harvey, who met Gurney at school in Gloucester, became

The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade

We have no comeliness like you.

The lips of our love’s might stay shut.

We have the evil spirits too

I was still a little frightened of his, at any too sudden step,

stirrings, and still pressure, we mounted. My right hand

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack

So after lunch I escaped to the woods, and grief had its

A brook goes bubbling by: the voice is his.

My heart is fooled with fancies, being wise;

ordinary look was gloomy, but on being spoken to, he

I hope you haven’t taken the casualty lists seriously again.

sun and storing up a large mass of solar energy

Eddie tells me you were quite sad about my demise – dear

His body that was so quick

You would not know him now…

Cover him, cover him soon!

He spins and burns and loves the air,

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

War’s damned interesting! It would be hard indeed to be

freedom, not comfort. I have seen beauty in life, in men

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

old lover, and all the glorious iniquity of London. Mea

Wilfred Owen, that was one of the great moments of my

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns

I walk till the stars of London wane

On his way to the Dardanelles, Rupert Brook had become

I would have thought them

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

groaned a little, and then went up and oosed off a gourd,

I imagined you were entrusting me with some holy secret

Pull of equipment, and too much use of pain and

ANOTHER INTERLUDE, ANOTHER MOOD CHANGE.

also a glorious sacrifice too, so says Brooke, so says

Adieu! or (chances three to one in favour of the

My lips, panting, shall drink space, mile by mile;

Cold winds encountered on the racing Down

The whole thing is a combination of sex-repression, war-

One day I will write something. It is to be one of the

Of mastering love. I never prayed that you

Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy.

But I’ve grown thoughtful now. And you have lost