Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/271

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Alexander Robertson
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the sacrifice was made is in that verse of his. The love of culture remained with him even in the midst of army life, when there was little time or privacy to foster it, and in Egypt, where he went with his battalion in December 1915, he gave the leisure he could get from railway making and trench digging to the study of Italian. His regiment was transferred to France in April 1916, and after a spell in hospital, with epidemic jaundice, he was glad to rejoin his old university comrades in the front line near Albert, early in June. On the morning of 1st July, in the great offensive on the Somme, he died along with several of those comrades in the very forefront of our attack on the German position. All his poems were written while he was on active service. 'It was his greatest joy and a great solace to him,' writes his brother, 'to express his soul in them, as army life was far from congenial to a man of his character.' Like his 'Moses on Pisgah,' he saw far off the land of promise he was not to tread. Strife and bloodshed