Enjoyment was hardly the word; he was in for a surprise he would not have believed possible in a book so familiar. The theme of the poems he remembered well, yet suddenly it seemed as if he had never really paid attention; certainly he had never felt its impact so strongly. Reduced to one of its simplest terms, this theme was that there was beauty and a lofty irony in the idea of youth stricken in untimely death, particularly on the battlefield; and it was sounded over and over with a delicate perfection that had once been breath-­taking in its art. Verse after witty verse, so satisfying before, now struck him with repulsion. Beneath the grace of the most lightly turned stanza lay a cynicism bitter beyond even the poet’s wonderful words: morbid, macabre, necrophiliac—polluted with an amorousness, a virtual lust, for the grave. The verses smelled of rot; no felicity of phrase could mask the underlying sordid horror. The crowning offense, the very climax of the insult, lay in the fact that the theme of dead youth was strummed not only with charm but with wit. Epigrams! His intellect reacted with violence, he who believed in the freedom of art, without regard to subject matter, without restrictions political or otherwise; and he could only come to the shocking conclusion that in wartime such a volume should have been suppressed.—He went down again to the smoker.

There was the same group admiring the handsome communicative paratrooper; but now, to his surprise, a large blond soldier in khaki and heavy GI boots sprang up and offered him his seat. The courtesy was so unexpected that for a moment John Grandin did not know how to deal with it. Of course he declined; he would have felt ridiculous indeed to take the place of a serviceman. Besides, the gesture was so patently that of youth to age, a young man’s politeness to an elder, that he was by turns amused and embarrassed. In their brief exchange he got the impression that the big soldier was probably from one of the daycoaches, come up to see what a Pullman was like, and not enjoying it much; he was uneasy and awkward, and seemed to sense keenly his anomalous position. Grandin further noted that the fellow had blue eyes, tawny curling hair bleached on top as if by long exposure to the sun, a well-­tanned face; and he was, by any standards, enormous.