Horrible News

Terrible News From The Front

U.S. Army Sergeant Adam J. Plumondore is dead. I never knew him, nor did I donate to the Walter-Adam Fund, but Kim made me feel he was alive. A person, rather then another number in an endless rank of troops. And it was to go he was on my side in a way.

Goodbye, Sergeant Plumondore. I don’t know if you liked poetry, but I find those lines, by R. Brooke, to be strangely fitting. Let him do the talking.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.