year, just after war was declared, he obtained a commission in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. By the following February he was out in France, and was killed on the evening of St. George's Day, 1916, after holding his trench all day against the enemy's onslaughts.
All the war verse in his book consists of two quatrains—one in memory of a friend, and one which may be taken as a response to Germany's famous or infamous Hymn:
Ah, hate like this would freeze our human tears,
And stab the morning star:
Not it, not it commands and mourns and bears
The storm and bitter glory of red war.
Few of our soldier poets who have gone wrote verse so mature in thought and finished in style as Robert Sterling's.
It might not seem a youth's imaginings,
But to an Attic age might well belong,
says Roger Quin, in his beautiful memorial sonnet; and there is one stanza of Sterling's 'Burial of Sophocles' that lingers with me as his own fitting epitaph:
