ular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under.
So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.

==

After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and did not return
to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital
for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness."
Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb.
As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life
suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind
by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished.
It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital.
On his recovery he obtained two months 'conge de convalescence',
part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time,
much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession
of "Juvenilia". On April 13th he wrote to his mother:

==

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 exquisite stanza 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 Colett