journalist of any kind; that is, even the instinct of the journalist dropped from him, when he touched it. He had had no thought, he says, of attempting to report the war: “If I had, I’d have come over as a correspondent instead of as a soldier.” All his days he had been trying to get closer and closer to the heart of life. In the war his profound instinct for humanity found fulfilment. Of his close comrades he writes: “Say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. Danger shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion--a fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle.” He was at present “a poet trying to be a soldier.” “To tell the truth, I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory.” “My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.” Upon his return to civilian life his civilian work “may be straight reporting.” As for “that mob of war writers (thank God--let me pharisaically say--that I am not one of them).” The book? “The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over--a century after it is over!” Kilmer’s “Holy Ireland,” a sketch of a lodging for the night enjoyed by a little group of Irish-American soldiers at a farmhouse in France, is the only piece of prose writing of any extent at all that came from him overseas. He himself wrote of it to his publishers: “I sent you a prose sketch ‘Holy Ireland,’ which represents the best prose writing I can do nowadays.” It is unmistakably a piece of literature, that is to say, though slight enough in substance, a work of firm and exquisite and enduring art. In a letter to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J., one of the last he wrote, the following paragraphs occur: I have written very little--two prose sketches and two poems--since I left the States, but I have a rich store of memories. Not that what I write matters--I have discovered, since some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not the tremendously important thing I once considered it. You will find me less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope, a man. And he ends with these words: “Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may love God more and that I may be unceasingly conscious of Him--that is the greatest desire I have.”