In June he had gone to visit the Morrells just before I left hospital at Oxford. He had no idea I was still there, but he wrote that perhaps it was as well that we didn’t meet, neither of us being at our best; at least one of us should be in a normal frame of mind when we were together. I had asked what he had been writing since he came home, and he answered that five poems of his had appeared in the _Cambridge Magazine_ (one of the few pacifist journals published in England at the time, the offices of which were later raided by militarist flying-cadets). He said that none of them were much good except as digs at the complacent and perfectly —— people who thought the war ought to go on indefinitely until every one was killed except themselves. The pacifists were urging him to produce something red hot in the style of Barbusse’s _Under Fire_ but he couldn’t do it; he had other things in his head, _not poems_. I didn’t know what he meant by this but hoped that it was not a programme of assassination. He wrote that the thought of all that happened in France nearly drove him dotty sometimes. He was down in Kent, where he could hear the guns thudding all the time across the Channel, on and on, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to rush back and die with the First Battalion or stay in England and do what he could to prevent the war going on. But both courses were hopeless. To go back and get killed would be only playing to the gallery—and the wrong gallery—and he could think of no way of doing any effective preventive work at home. His name had been sent in for an officer-cadet battalion appointment in England, which would keep him safe if he wanted to take it; but it seemed a dishonourable way out. Now at the end of July another letter came: it felt rather thin. I sat down to read it on the bench dedicated by Queen Victoria to John Brown (‘a truer and more faithful heart never burned within human breast’). When I opened the envelope a newspaper-cutting fluttered out; it was marked in ink: ‘_Bradford Pioneer_, Friday, July 27, 1917.’ I read the wrong side first: The C.O.’s must be Set Free _By Philip Frankford_ The conscientious objector is a brave man. He will be remembered as one of the few noble actors in this world drama when the impartial historian of the future sums up the history of this awful war. The C.O. is putting down militarism. He is fighting for freedom and liberty. He is making a mighty onslaught upon despotism. And, above all, he is preparing the way for the final abolition of war. But thanks to the lying, corrupt, and dastardly capitalist Press these facts are not known to the general public, who have been taught to look upon the conscientious objectors as skunks, cowards, and shirkers.