"Dearest Mother: I wrote to you this morning and said that I would try to 'get' another boche in the evening. I did!"
Others there were, but, so far as these records show, few, like Alan Seeger, of brooding poetic temperament, with a fiery thirst for experience, snatching at death as if it were the last untasted cup of intoxication, and luxuriating in danger for the fuller, intenser sense of life that it gave in the allotted interval. After a year and a half of war, knowing well where of he spoke, Seeger wrote that he saw all life revolving about the twin poles of Love and Strife, in the macrocosm, and in the microcosm of his own emotions. Love was good, he held,
as far as it goes, but it goes only half way, and my aspiration was to go all the gamut, to "drink life to the lees." My interest in life was passion, my object to experience it in all rare and refined, in all intense and violent forms. The war having broken out, then, it was natural that I should have staked my life on learning what it alone could teach me. How could I have let millions of other men know an emotion that I remained ignorant of?
Doubtless there were a few men in this company with blood so hot or heart so fully satiated with ordinary experience that death in battle was, indeed, to them, as Mr. John Jay Chapman puts it, "the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending"; but the total impression that one gathers from a war memorial in which three hundred and seventy-three intelligent men are allowed to speak is very different from that.
