for his boys. Yet Sorley knew and felt that he had been unusually lucky in this respect. After leaving school he went to Germany for some months, and loved the life he saw in Mecklenberg Schwerin. He was reading the Odyssey, no longer one hundred lines at a time, but for his own pleasure, in long draughts, and was struck by the resemblance of the life he found about him, in that foreign place, to that he was reading about. He saw many things in Germany that were wrong, but it seemed to him that, as a nation, they had something to live for, while the English had struck him as lacking an adequate goal for effort. War was declared and he had to hurry across the frontier. In Cologne station he notes the various attitudes of the nationalities: Americans in a bustle for themselves; Germans in a bustle too, but for the Fatherland; "dark uprooted Italians peering from a squeaking truck—like Cassandra from the backmost car looking steadily down on Agamemnon." He was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant before August was out, and by December he writes:
LOST
Across my past imaginings
Has dropped a blindness silent and slow.
My eye is bent on other things
Than those it once did see and know.
I may not think on those dear lands
(O far away and long ago!)
Where the old battered signpost stands
And silently the four roads go
East, west, south and north,
And the cold winter winds do blow.
And what the evening will bring forth
Is not for me nor you to know.
