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 Turns orange brown.” And it has for its refrain “But you—at least—are out of it.” It goes on to tell of the officers who fell, and repeats the reflection which we all have when we gaze on the dead at the end of an attack and know that we ourselves have escaped: “One wonders why you died.” And then, “We never talked of glory, And each thought a lot of one girl And waited most days for hours in the rain Till she came: But we never talked of Fame——” And lastly, addressing the dead, “But we who remain shall grow old, We shall know the cold Of cheerless Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces, And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces, And the long ranges of comfortless years And the long gamut of human fears— But, for you, it shall be for ever Spring, And only you shall be for ever fearless, And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs, And only you, where the water-lily swims Shall walk along the pathways, thro’ the willows Of your west. You who went west, And only you on silvery twilight pillows Shall take your rest In the soft sweet glooms, Of twilight rooms——” There’s the whole of our one and only cowardice in a nut-shell—that we, who have posed as conquerors for a while, will, if we survive, return to the normal things of life to find our spirits unexalted and the commonplace still commonplace.