Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/272

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218
For Remembrance

were around him, but his dreams were not of them—always, as in the hospital at Provence, he was grateful for a window, a small space, through which he could yet see nature and humanity. His vision of the 'Survivors,' who shall reach the goal, sees them looking back with sadness on the dark hours when necessity made them blind to pity, as to danger,

Our human kind
Debasing to an instrument to slay
Man and his hopes;

and the reward that is to be theirs for all they have done and endured is not the crushing of their enemy, the conquest of his land, but to live their own lives once more, to have

Self-mastery again, once more the sweet
Beatitude of freedom and the sense
Of quiet and security, intense;
Home and home faces lit with unexpressed
Joy, and the gladness of the spirit's rest.

Less of a student, perhaps, more of a man of action, Lieutenant A. L. Jenkins was still a dreamer, an idealist, whose ideal of happiness was not of a kind that could ever be won by the sword, but is the strange, sweet, immaterial some-