Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/314

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256
For Remembrance

séance where among other answers he obtained by table-rapping was one assuring him he would return to Australia, unwounded, on the 12th February 1918, and he made a note to recollect that date; but before it was reached he had been six months dead. He got a thrill out of recognising Kipling seated near him at an Albert Hall concert. Replying to an inquiry from his father as to what literary work he had been doing lately, he says, 'I shall never write in the proper sense. For one thing, between them, Chesterton and Rupert Brooke have left nothing for me to write about'; and he goes on to give a capital sketch of the only glimpse of Chesterton he ever had. 'Did I tell you I had met him—quite unofficially? It was at the War Office. I was waiting for an interview with some person Sir Astley Corbet gave me an intro. to—I forget his name—and while I was waiting G. K. C. came in and sat down heavily opposite me. It was unmistakably himself—with a cape thrown across his shoulder and a soft felt hat over his eyes. He picked up