A STUDENT UNDER FIRE.•
MR. BERNARD BITE, assistant-master at the Coopers' Company's School, and well known for his lectures on English literature et the Working Men's College, joined the Border Regiment as an officer in April, 1915, obtained the command of a battery in February, 1916, and was killed on April 30th of the same year while on observa- tion duty. A selection of his letters and other writings has been published as a memorial volume and should appeal to many readers. The essays, dealing mainly with literary subjects, are in- stinct with scholarship, and many of the poems have a considerable amount of charm. Of special note among the last are " February in the Firing Line " and" The Wood of 8—." The letters, which reveal an attractive personality, are particularly interesting as showing yet once again the student and man of letters in the firing-lino. In March, 1916, Mr. Pitt wrote to a College friend am follows :- " How Is the College doing in these hard times ? It hardly seems credible that it still exists, with so many of its tutors and students away ; and yet, I so often feel that the reality is Educa- tion and Fraternity, while all this horror of war is a transient appearance of the impossible. Such a glance into tho chaos that man can make, unless love is his guiding principle, is indeed a terri- fying experience. I am now in a hilly wooded region, like the skirts of the Kentish Downs. with copses full of anemone. and delicate periwinkles, and the sapling hazels and willows tasselled and downy with catkins and buds. A mile away is a village, shattered and wasted, and beyond that a sight more shocking than the ruin of human work, a ghastly wood where the broken trunks and splintered branches take on weird and diabolical forms. It is the Bois de s. The ground round about is poisoned with human relics, limbs and bundles of clothes filled with rotten flesh, and even those poor remains of men which pious hands have buried are daily dieinterred by plunging Melte. 8— itself is merely a heap of bricks and stones, and it reeks to heaven of mortality. Do you wonder that, reading Wordsworth this afternoon in a. clearing of the unpolluted woodlands, and marking the lovely faded colours on the wings of hibernated butterflies, and their soft motions, I felt a disgust, even to sickness, of the appalling wickedness of war ? Sometimes one has groat need of a strength which ie not in one's own power to use, but in a grace of God. I have so far escaped injury, and have seen very heavy fighting in different parts of our line. I was recommended for the Military Cross, but my usual bad luck intervened to relegate me to ' mentioned in despatches' only. Now I am in command of a Trench Mortar Battery, and I find the work au interesting as any war-making can be. You know we all long for the war to end, whether by peace, or by that furious slaughter which must lead to peace." But Mr. Pitt was not alone in his enjoyment of the poets, for he tells us in an entertaining letter, written only a few days before his death, that at the C.O.'s birthday party ho recited Keate's " Ode to a Nightingale," and was even urged to road some of his own verses.
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