Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

40 Halcyon Days No More
. . . we were about seven miles over the lines, when we spotted at 14,000
feet below us some Huns. The dive down from that height was tremendous
. . . right underneath me was a large Hun two-seater (beautifully camouflaged).
I dived at him, but both my guns had stoppages, and I had to zigzag
away . . . from the ground, they threw up every possible thing at me;
machine-gun fire, tracers, shrapnel, etc. The Hun pilot did not see me at
first . . . I opened fire before the observer had time to get his gun to bear on
me and fired a burst from 25 yards range. In a second, the nose of his machine
dropped and he spun down earthward, out of control, engine full on.’’
Arthur’s close friend from the Lycée, Choura Stroumillo, saved many
of Arthur’s letters from the front. When he asked Arthur if he mused over
the possibility of his own death, Arthur admitted a feeling of curiosity:
‘‘Death, for me, lost its metaphysical meaning the day I cracked down
after a forced landing on the French coast. . . . I did not think at all . . . like
an animal at bay, waiting in desperation for the right moment to jump . . .
instincts take over.’’ ‘‘There is no need to take death too seriously,’’ he
continued; ‘‘if one has to die, what a great way to go!’’
Not long after this letter, the correspondence stopped. Olga and her
mother, as next of kin, received a telegram from the Air Ministry informing
them of Arthur’s death ‘‘in action,’’ giving no details. Choura hurried
to the rue Chamfort to find his mother and Olga in deep mourning—‘‘they
could hardly speak.’’ A few days later they were informed that Arthur had
been shot down in aerial combat over Courrières (near Arras), France,
and buried by the German enemy in a country graveyard. Some sixty-five
years later, his school friend Choura wrote: ‘‘[Arthur] was the hero of my
youth . . . [with] all the gifts and beauty of a young god descended from
Mt. Olympus . . . his apparent reserve masked his shyness and strong sense
of personal integrity. . . . [He had] an astonishing enthusiasm about life.
. . . We belonged to a generation of mythmakers.’’ He quoted from Arthur’s
last letter: ‘‘I have a feeling that something greater and more vital
will come out of this war . . . there will always be someone to carry on the
torch of freedom and enlightenment to the following generations.’’
Olga recorded only the briefest details of her brother’s death, as if it
hurt too much to think or to write about, but in her seventies, she privately
published Arthur’s war letters.