His section being disbanded, he joined the Royal Flying Corps, trained in Egypt, returned to England, and while serving in a home-defence squadron was killed in an aeroplane accident on the last night of 1917. That he too knew for what he died and was more than willing to die for it let his 'Happy Warriors,' an elegy on his dead friends who had fallen in battle, bear witness:
Surely they sleep content, our valiant dead,
Fallen untimely in the savage strife:
They have but followed whither duty led,
To find a fuller life.
Who, then, are we to grudge the bitter price
Of this our land inviolate through the years,
Or mar the splendour of their sacrifice
That is too high for tears....
God grant we fail not at the test—that when
We take, mayhap, our places in the fray,
Come life, come death, we quit ourselves like men,
The peers of such as they.
The gallantry and glamour of old wars is in his 'Crusaders,' written in Palestine, and the one dread that, as in the verse of Major Stewart and others, haunted these brave men—the fear of being afraid—is
