e. He had gone out under fire to hold up a
wounded German and give him water. He did not die then, but soon after,
on the Hindenburg Line, because, chosen as a good man who was expert in
killing others with a deadly mechanism, he was leading in an attack. This
last letter of his, which arrived after the telegram warning us, in
effect, that there could be no more correspondence with him, alluded in
contempt to his noble profession and task, and ended with a quotation
from Drum Taps which he prayed I would understand.

His prayer was in vain. I did not understand. I read that quotation at
breakfast, just after finishing my fierce and terrible _Daily Dustpan_,
and the quotation, therefore, was at once repugnant and unfortunate. For
clearly the leader-writer of the _Dustpan_ was a bolder and more martial
man. It is but fair to assume, however, that as that journalist in the
normal routine of a day devoted to his country had not had the good
fortune to run up against the machine guns of the Hindenburg trenches,
naturally he was better able to speak than a soldier who was idly
swinging in the wire there. The quotation, strange for a Guardsman to
make, is worth examining as an example of the baleful influence war has
upon those who must do the fighting which journalists have the hard fate
merely to indicate is the duty of others. The verse actually is called
Reconciliation. After a partial recovery from the shame of the revelation
of my correspondent's unsoldierly spirit, a shame which was a little
softened by the thought that anyhow he was dead, I went to _Leaves of
Grass_ for the first time for some years, to see whether Drum Taps
accorded with war as we know it.

And now I am forced to confess that we may no longer accuse the Americans
of coming late into the War. They appear to have been in it, if the date
of Drum Taps is ignored, longer even than Fleet Street. I cannot see that
we have contributed anything out of our experiences of battle which can
compare with Whitman's poems. He appears to have known of war in
essential episodes and incidents, as well as from a high vision of it, in
a measure which the literature of our own tragedy does not compass.

A minor poet told me once that he could not read Whitman. He declared it
was like chewing glass. When we criticize others, the instant penalty is
that we unwittingly confess what we are ourselves. We know the reception
of _Leaves of Grass_ was of the kind which not seldom