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Another chest close by held all the hundreds of letters, trench poems and songs, including Masefield's By a Bierside, sent to Marion Scott at the Royal College of Music. Here too are the manuscripts of Sassoon's Aftermath :

Do you remember the rats
And the stench of corpses rotting?

and Gurney's To his Love, written when he believed his boyhood friend and fellow poet, Will (F W) Harvey, killed.

One astonishing objet d'art exhibited is the very signpost which Sorley used to see on his Marlborough Downs 'sweats', or cross country runs, and which he immortalised (it features in a sonnet written four months before he died, whose proposed title (Death -- and the Downs) is poignantly akin to Gurney's first collection, Severn and Somme), in several of his most cogent youthful poems. Who after all was there to show the way? Not Alan Clark's 'donkeys', certainly, those moustachioed generals who did for them all by their plan of attack. A pity, perhaps, that Gurney, who knew of Sorley's (as well as Sassoon's and Blunden's) work never, apparently, set him.

He had planned otherwise : 'By heaven, though, what stuff there will be to set apres la guerre! : Brooke, Sorley (I have not read him), Sassoon, Gibson ...' (from Gurney's Collected Letters, ed R K R Thornton, Carcanet-Midnag, p292). Gurney had by 1917 (Gurney, Letters ed.Thornton, op cit, p251) hit on (in Galloway Kyle's 'Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men') 'Sorley's translation from Faust' -- two quatrains from Faust, Part II (eight key lines, 6944-7 and 6820-3, taken from a letter Sorley wrote from training camp in December 1914.) Sorley, from his sojourn in Meckleberg (Schwerin) and Thuringia (Jena University) in the months before war broke out -- he only left Germany early in August 1914 -- was already addicted to Goethe; a copy sent by his mother at his request to France in 1915 was amongst his possessions when he died at Loos a few months later. The lines Gurney moted included Goethe's classic assertion 'Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, / Der ta"glich sie erobern muss.' ('He only owns his Freedom, owns Existence, / Who every day must conquer her anew' -- something both Gurney himself could be said to have imitated) and culminate in the consequence : 'Er, unbefriedigt jeden Augenlick!' 'He, every moment still unsatisfied.' By March 1918 Gurney also knew (from E B Osborn's 1917 Johan Murray collection, A Muse in Arms (reissued by John Lane in 1919) ) -- which included Charles Hamilton Sorley's To Germany :

You were blind like us.
Your hurt no man designed ...
... in each other's dearest ways we stand
And hiss and hate ...
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder.

plus A Letter from the Trenches ('I have not brought my Odyssey ...') and The Army of Death ('When you see millions of the mouthless dead ...', the poem quoted at the outset of this article) all of which Gurney rates (along with Grenfell, Graves, Sassoon, Nichols and Harvey) amongst the best. That autumn, back from war hospital, Gurney 'especially recommends' both Sorley and Ledwidge, amongst others, in a letter written in late 1918 to Winifred Chapman.

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