Oh happy! Generations have lived and died
And only dreamed such things as we have seen and known!
Splendour of men, death laughed at, death defied,
Round the great world on the winds is their tale blown;
Whatever pass, these ever shall abide:
In memory's Valhalla, an imperishable throne.
Leonard Cook had won his M.C. before he died, fighting gallantly. Hamish Mann has met the fate he foresaw for himself when he wrote his 'Envoi' and told in another song of the dream that he would not rest now on some placid hillside of home, but in France within hearing of the guns....
And I shall sleep beneath that foreign soil
As peacefully as e'er 'neath heather flower.
Knowing that I have answered Duty's call,
Knowing that I have died in England's hour
—but he met his fate heroically leading his platoon in that Arras advance in which Littlejohn fell.
Under whatever premonitions may have come to him, the one firm conviction Charles Masefield carried with him into the war, and that made him indifferent to what might happen to himself, was that
Right is might, and we shall prevail.
