Did I tell you that the Embassy have managed to get my M.S. for me?
It was very interesting to re-read this work, which I had almost forgotten.

I found much that was good in it, but much that was juvenile too,
and am not so anxious to publish it as it stands. I shall probably

make extracts from it and join it with what I have done since.
I shall go back to the front on the first of May without regrets.

These visits to the rear only confirm me in my conviction
that the work up there on the front is so far the most interesting work

a man can be doing at this moment, that nothing else counts in comparison.
==

On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine", Mrs. Weeks: "The chateau
in the grounds of which we are barracked, has a most beautiful name --

Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty? I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it,
as a ring is made express for a jewel. It is a wonderful

old seventeenth-century manor, surrounded by a lordly estate.
What is that exquisitestanza in `Maud' about `in the evening

through the lilacs (or laurels) of the old manorial home'?*
Look it up and send it to me." Ten days later he wrote to the same lady:

--
* He was doubtless thinking of this:

Alas for her that met me,
That heard me softly call,

Came glimmering thro' the laurels
In the quiet evenfall,

In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.

--
==

The week in the trenches was a week of the most beautiful weather. . . .
These days were saddened by the death of poor Colette in the bombardment,

and by the suffering of his brother who has now returned after the burial.
They were marked on the other hand by two afternoons of rather

memorable emotion. Exasperated by the inactivity of the sector here,
and tempted by danger, I stole off twice after guard,

and made a patrol all by myself through the wood paths and trails
between the lines. In the front of these, at a crossing of paths

not far from one of our posts, I found a burnt rocket-stick
planted in the ground, and a scrap of paper stuck in the top,

placed there by the boches to guide their little mischief-making parties
when they come to visit us in the night. The scrap of paper

was nothing else than a bit of the `Berliner Tageblatt'.
This seemed so interesting to me that I reported it to the captain,

though my going out alone this way is a thing strictly forbidden.
He was very decent about it though, and seemed really interested

in the information. Yesterday afternoon I repeated this exploit,
following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear up

to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my name.
It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with taunts,

with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never been
in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in daylight.

Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facilitates ambushes,
for one must keep to the paths, owing to the underbrush.

I and a few others are going to try to get permission
to go out on `patrouilles d'embuscade' and bring in some live prisoners.

It would be quite an extraordinary feat if we could pull it off.
In our present existence it is the only way I can think of

to get the Croix de Guerre. And to be worthy of my marraine
I think that I ought to have the Croix de Guerre.

==
He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration Day, May 30th,

to read, before the statue of Lafayette and Washington,
the "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France",

which he had written at the request of a Committee of American residents;
but his "permission" fortunately" target="_blank" title="ad.不幸；不朽；可惜">unfortunately did not arrive in time. Completed in

two days, during which he was engaged in the hardest sort of labour
in the trenches, this Ode is certainly the crown of the poet's achievement.

It is entirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic occasion.
If the war has produced a nobler utterance, it has not come my way.

On June 24th, he again wrote, giving an account of a march,
which was "without exception the hardest he had ever made" --

"20 kilometers through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust.
Something around 30 kilograms on the back. About 50 per cent dropped

by the way. By making a supreme effort, I managed to get in at the finish,
with the fifteen men that were all that was left of the section."

He now knew that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation,"
he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not at liberty

to say anything about it. My greatest preoccupation now
is whether this affair is coming off before or after the 4th of July.

The indications are that it is going to break very soon.
In that case nothing doing in the way of permission.

But I still have hopes of getting in."
His hopes of getting to Paris were frustrated, as were all his other hopes

save one -- the hope of
That rare privilege of dying well.

On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the evening of July 4th,
the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village

of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush,
and his squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine guns,

concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan among them --
wounded in several places. But the following waves of attack

were more fortunate. As his comrades came up to him,
Alan cheered them on; and as they left him behind,

they heard him singing a marching-song in English: --
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee.

They took the village, they drove the invaders out;
but for some reason unknown -- perhaps a very good one --

the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning,
Alan Seeger lay dead.

There is little to add. He wrote his own best epitaph in the "Ode": --
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground

Where the forlorn, the gallantcharge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,

And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,

Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: --
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops,

Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers.

The `Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15",
and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it."

But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge,
to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her.

That will come later. One day France will know that this unassuming
soldier of the Legion,

Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,

was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.
The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would

doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity --
perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood,

which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show
a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken,

among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced,
not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress

and under its haunting menace.
--

* Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems"
has anything been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publishing.

Indeed nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems
on which he had written "These are worthless."

--
Again and again in the "Last Poems" -- notably in "Maktoob"