he lasted no more than a week, would make death worth while.
“I’ll get home on special leave soon,” wrote Lieutenant Mackintosh. “I’ve had my taste of a show. It’s hell.” He got back wounded and found himself kept perforce in England as an instructor. The knowledge that his life was secure for a little while, that he could sleep in clean white-sheeted beds, that he could wash whenever he liked meant nothing to him, when contrasted with the loss to his self-respect that his courage was no longer tested and challenged. In the poem “From Home” he expresses this disgust for personal ease when friends are dying. He had just had news of an engagement in which his battalion had taken part. In his imagination he saw what must have happened:—
And shows me plain to see,
Battle and bodies of men that lived
And fought along with me.
Oh God, it would not have been so hard
If I’d been in it too,
But you are lying stiff, my friends,
And I not there with you.”
Besides that picture in bitter self-contempt he places his own warm peace:—
By a comfortable fire,
