Alan returned to Paris. He took Bruges on his way, and there left
the manuscript of his poems in the keeping of a printer,
not foreseeing the risks to which he was thus exposing them.

The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty or fifty
of his fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France.
Why did he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war
to be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which,
when it offered itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal.
Long before the war was anything more than a vague possibility,
he had imagined the time

. . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides
Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them
Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides.

So far back indeed as May, 1912, he had written to his mother from Paris:
"Is it not fine the way the Balkan States are triumphing?
I have been so excited over the war, it would have needed
a very small opportunity to have taken me over there." It is evident, then,
that the soldier's life had long been included among the possibilities
which fascinated him. But apart from this general proclivity to adventure,
this desire to "live dangerously", he was impelled by a simple sentiment
of loyalty to the country and city of his heart, which he himself explained
in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to `The New Republic'
(New York, May 22, 1915):

==
I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case