Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/253

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Harold Chapin
203

lived many years in England and done the best of his work here, but it was not for England only that he went into the war. Nor was he out after the quickest peace of any sort that would last his time. He thought less of his own future than of the future of his little son, and contemplating the likelihood of his not returning, he writes more than once of what he would wish his son to be taught, and not to be taught, when he is old enough. 'Have I warned you against rumours?' he says in a letter from the front to his wife. 'Yes, I believe I have. Beware of them, especially rumours of peace. We don't want peace till they 're beaten, do we?' And to his mother, in June 1915: 'I made the discovery yesterday that unless I can leave a nice, well-finished-off war behind me I don't want to come home. This in spite of the fact that I am regularly and miserably homesick for at least half an hour every morning and two hours every evening, and heartily fed up with the war every waking hour in between.... To go home to Vallie and Mummy is not what