In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He
is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw,
wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and
the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled
leaf (as I have noticed is common in many poets).
His nose is aquiline, the nostrils being wide and heavily
arched. This characteristic and the fullness, depth and
heat of his dark eyes give him the air of a sullen
falcon. He speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if
they pained him, in a voice that has something of the
troubled thickness apparent in the voices of those who
emerge from a deep grief. As he speaks, his large
hands, roughened by trench toil and by riding, wander
aimlessly until some emotion grips him when the
knuckles harden and he clutches at his knees or at the
edge of the table. And all the while he will be breathing
hard like a man who has swum a distance. When
he reads his poems he chants and one would think
that he communed with himself save that, at the
pauses, he shoots a powerful glance at the listener.
Between the poems he is still but moves his lips...
He likes best to speak of hunting (he will shout of it!),
of open air mornings when the gorse alone flames
brighter than the sky, of country quiet, of his mother,
[Footnote: His father was a well-to-do country gentleman of
Anglo-Jewish stock, his mother an English woman, a Miss
Thornycroft, sister of the sculptor of that name.]
of poetry--usually Shelley, Masefield and Thomas
Hardy--and last and chiefly--but always with a rapid,
tumbling enunciation and a much-irked desperate air
filled with pain--of soldiers. For the incubus of war
is on him so that his days are shot with anguish and
his nights with horror.
He is twenty-eight years old; was educated at
Marlborough and Christchurch, Oxford; was a master of
fox-hounds and is a captain in the Royal Welsh
Fusiliers. Thrice he has fought in France and once in
Palestine. Behind his name are set the letters M.C.
since he has won the Military Cross for an act of
valour which went near to securing him a higher
honour.