only daring and honest as these boys, but wise and profoundly gentle.
A shirt was clinging to Nichols' image, but Sassoon appears in full uniform, equal to every claim made by a day of action. Or is his smartness rather intellectual than practical? Derision hardly consists with might and main. Scorn abstracts itself and stands aside. The dapper mind is exasperated by fatigue and danger, and ever tries to reserve for self-realisation a few crumbs of time and energy. Shall we not picture this satirist better huddling under a greatcoat in some chilly dug-out? Refusing to drop asleep, he muses of his room in college, or holds a book he is too tired to read for a few seconds near his candle-end before putting it out. Preoccupied with to-day, he is of the best that it recognises in itself.
But no! How easy it is to be unjust! Another little book[1] arrives, clearer-voiced; in it the self-conscious grin opens to a bitter laugh, while on its later pages the soul rebels, repents and aspires, with grace and power.
BANISHMENT
I AM banished from the patient men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,—
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.
- ↑ Counter-Attack and Other Poems. Siegfried Sassoon. Heinemann. 2s. 6d.
