For it's he shall walk beside her
In the perfume of the air
To the silver, silver music
Of her footstep on the stair.”
All the world's idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don't want any heaven that isn't a re-living of the old happy memories.
I find that Hueffer expresses a feeling that many of us have secretly, but which I have never heard any man acknowledge—the feeling that all the remainder of his days he will have to be explaining if he comes to the end of the war alive—almost the feeling that he will have lost his great chance of nobility by not dying. Hueffer's poem is called One Day's List; it's a list of three officers and 270 other ranks of his regiment who were killed in action. It commences:
“My dears,
The rain drips down on Rouen Town,
The leaves drip down
And so the mud