Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/201

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Charles Masefield
159

For whom, deep slumbering in his cot,
All wounds and wars and deaths are not....
Such is the household every night
Illumined by the candle light.


Searchlights are so blinding and white,
The things they show you shall not hear;
Enough to see them; it is not right
We should tell of them too, my love, my dear.

In October he was called back home by the sudden death of his only partner, his mother's brother, and was granted three months' special leave. He crowded much strenuous work into that brief space, and in February 1917 rejoined his regiment in England. In May he returned to France, and next month received the M.C. for the brilliant handling of his men in an attack on 14th June near Lens; but he never knew of this honour, for leading his troops—he had now been made acting-captain—in another attack on 1st July he was fatally wounded and taken prisoner, and died the next day. I began speaking of him by quoting some verses in which he seemed calmly to accept as inevitable the certainty of his own death, but his 'In Honorem Fortium' will tell you that the