There were Ireland, of course, and India, and Egypt, and opium; dreadful ills! He shuddered imperceptibly. But these things, in the final analysis, were not England. England was the poets whose voices sing always of freedom; England was the barons at Runnymede; Magna Carta; England was America, too; the pilgrims who planted a dream upon the wilderness; and that still prophetic voice speaking today above the roar and belch of war to the heart of the world. England was Westminster: Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Wilson. “Cloud-capped towers” ... “and visions splendid” ... “men too proud to fight.” Then the young soldier thought of his king; instinctively his eyes lifted, his hand rose to the salute. Not as a kindly, middle-aged man, slightly shrunken with mediocrity, did the young soldier think of his king. To him, he was a knightly, shining figure, splendid with romance. Medieval mysticism; crusaders faring forth to holy lands; the glamour of Elizabeth’s bright reign; all the lesser poets like fugitive and falling stars upon the night; these things were England to the young soldier, were his king. King and Country! The phrase lifted him again in exaltation. King and Country! It was for that he was a warrior; it was for poetry and peace--tranquility like the silence here in Westminster, where dreams unfold. War was a cloud that would pass from before the shining beauty of life. Others would know it again. _Others_.... Bitterness and grief for a moment assailed him. He had felt life poignantly. A poet does; most poignantly, perhaps, the man not quite a poet. Beauty had been so vividly acute; the laughter of forsythia in the spring; summer’s perfumed, star-sown nights, the flaunting flags of autumn, the thrill like military music on the wind. These things to him were happiness as sharp as pain. And winter, too, with its largo of snow. It was winter now ... and snowing. As the exaltation of his mood subsided, the soldier found his down-cast gaze caught by an insignia on the overcoat that hung across his arm; the number of a regiment, a division. The symbols seemed to him suddenly utterly divorced from himself, alien. War was not possible, _the war was not_. It could not be that yesterday he had been in France; tomorrow he would be there again. Incredulity swept him. In the silence and the solitude and the twilight of Westminster, the thing that he had left, the thing to which he must return, seemed impossible, an unreality, delirium. He thought suddenly of death ... it was the first time he had thought of death since he had entered the Abbey. It seemed incredible that men were dying at that instant, killing each other with terrible guns, when the quiet here was so profound.