LIVING BAYONETS (continued 2)

This time last year I was marching into action with temperature of 104 degrees, and you were reaching London, wondering whether I was truly coming on leave. A queer year it has been; in spite of all our anticipations to the contrary, we're still alive. I wish we were to meet again this year, and we may. We know so little. As Whitcomb Riley says in complete acceptance of human fortuitousness, “No child knows when it goes to sleep.”

XXVI

Paris

January 13, 1918

About an hour ago I got into Paris from my first trip. I've been where M. and I spent our splendid summer so many years ago, only now the river is spanned with ice and the country is a grey-sage colour. From what I can see the Americans are preparing as if for a war that is going to last for thirty years. America is in the war literally to her last man and her last dollar; when her hour comes to strike, she will be like a second England in the fight.

I made my tour with an officer who was with Hoover three years in Belgium, and who before that was a student in Paris. As a consequence, he speaks French like a native. Every detail of my trip was arranged ahead by telephone and telegram; automobiles were waiting. There is no pretence about the American Army. My rank as lieutenant is, of course, quite inadequate to the task I have undertaken. But the American high officer carries no side or swank. Having produced my credentials, I am seated at the mess beside generals and allowed to ask any questions, however searching. Everyone I have met as yet is hats off to the English and the French—they go out of their way to make comparisons which are in their own disfavour and unjust to themselves. I have been making a particular study of their transport facilities and their artillery training. Both are being carried out on a magnificently thorough scale. I undertake to assert that they will have as fine artillery as can be found on the Western Front by the time they are ready. I certainly never saw such painstaking and methodical training.

As you know, the phase of the war that I am particularly interested in is the closeness of international relations that will result when the war is ended. The tightening of bonds between the French, Americans and English can be daily witnessed and felt. The Americans are loud in their praise of their French and British instructors—the instructors are equally proud of their pupils. On the street, in hotels and trains, the three races hobnob together.

I came back to-day with a French artillery and cavalry officer—splendid fellows. We had fought together on the Somme, we discovered, and had occupied the same Front, though at separate times, at Vimy. The artilleryman was a young French noble, and, as only noblemen can these days, had a car waiting for him at the station He insisted on taking me to my hotel, and we parted the most excellent friends.

I have two days in which to write up my experiences, and on Tuesday I shall set out on a tour in a new direction. So much I am able to tell you; the rest will be in my book when it is published.

This time last year we were together in London—how long ago it seems and sounds! Years are longer and of more value than they once were. This year I'm here. Next year where? This time next year the war will not be ended, I'm certain, nor even the year after that, perhaps. The more we feel our strength, the more we are called upon to suffer, the sterner will become our terms.

It's nearly eleven, my dear ones, and time that I was asleep. I have Henri Bordeaux's story of The Last Days of Fort Vaux beside me—it's most heroic reading. What shall we do when the gates of heroism grow narrow and peace has been declared? Something spiritual will have gone out of life when the challenge of the horrible is ended.

XXVII

Paris

January 19, 1918

I'm expecting to go to American Headquarters on Tuesday and to see something of work immediately behind the lines. I find what I am doing exceptionally interesting, and hope to do a good book on it.

Wherever one goes the best men one meets are Hoover's disciples from Belgium. They tell extraordinary stories of the heroism of the patriots whom they knew there—people by the score who duplicated Miss Cavell's courage and paid the penalty. Their experience of Hun brutality has somehow dulled their sense of horror—they speak of it as something quite commonplace and to be expected.

On Friday I saw Miss Holt's work for the blind. She bears out for France all that I have said about the amazing sharing of the wounded in England. One man in her care was not only totally blind, but he had also lost both arms. In the hospital there were men less grievously mutilated than himself, who hardly knew how to endure their loss. For the sake of the cheeriness of his example, he used to go round the ward with gifts of cigarettes, which he almost thought he lit for the men himself, for he used to say to Miss Holt before undertaking such a journey, “You are my hands.”

We, in England, and still less in America, have never approached the loathing which is felt for the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter his name, as though the very word was foul in the mouth. Wherever you go lonely men or women are pointed out to you; all of his or her family are behind the German lines. We think we have suffered, but we have not sounded one fathom of this depth of agony. On every hand I hear that the French Army is stronger than ever, better equipped and more firm in its moral. As an impassioned Frenchman said to me yesterday, his eyes blazing as he banged the table, “They shall not pass. I say so—and I am France.”

In the face of all this I do not wonder that the French misunderstand the easy good-humour with which we English go out to die. In their eyes and with the throbbing of their wounds, this war is a matter for neither good-humour nor sportsmanship, but only for the indignant, inarticulate wrath of a Hebrew god. If every weapon was taken from their hands and all the young men were gone, with clenched fists those who were left would smite and smite to the last. It is fitting that they should feel this way, but I'm glad that our English boys can still laugh while they die.

And now I'm going out on the Boulevards to get lunch.

XXVIII

Paris

January 30, 1918

Yesterday on my return to Paris I found all your letters awaiting me—a real big pile which took me over an hour to read. The latest was written on New Year's Day in the throes of coal shortage and intense cold. Really it seems absurd that you should be starved for warmth in America. Last week I was within eighteen kilometres of the Front line staying in a hotel as luxurious as the Astor, with plenty of heat and a hot bath at midnight in a private bathroom. All the appointments and comforts were perfect; booming through the night came the perpetual muttering of the guns. There were troops of all kinds marching up for an attack; the villages were packed, but there was no disorganization.

Well, I've had a great trip this last time. I went to see refugee work—and saw it. There were barracks full of babies—the youngest only six days' old. There were very many children who have been re-captured from the Huns.

To-morrow I start off for the borders of Switzerland to see the repatriated French civilians arrive. Then I go with the head of the Red Cross for a tour to see the reconstruction work in the devastated districts. When that is finished, I return to London to put my book together. I hope to get back to my battery about the end of March.

What a time I have had. A year ago it would have seemed impossible. I've motored, gone by speeders and trains to all kinds of quiet and ancient places which it would never have entered my head to visit in peace times. The American soldier is everywhere, striking a strange note of modernity and contrast. He sits on fences through the country-side, swinging his legs and smoking Bull Durham, when he isn't charging a swinging sack with a bayonet. He is the particular pal of all the French children.

I'm now due for a day of interviews and shall have to ring off. I rose at seven this morning so as to write this letter. At the moment I'm sitting in a deep arm-chair, with an electric lamp at my elbow. It's an awful war! In less than two months I'll be sitting in clothes that I haven't taken off for a fortnight—the mud will be my couch and the flash of the guns my reading lamp. It's funny, but up there in the discomfort I shall be ten times more happy.

XXIX

Paris

February 13, 1918

I've not heard from you for two weeks—which is no fault of yours. There was a delay in getting passports—so I'm only just back from the devastated districts and get on board the train for London to-night. It's exactly six weeks today since I left England on this adventure.

I've done a good many things since last I wrote you. Did I tell you that among others I visited Miss Holt's work for the blind? I can think of nothing which does more to call out one's sympathy than to sit among those sightless eyes. I have talked about courage, but these men leave me appalled and silent. They are covered with decorations—the Legion d'.onneur, etc. They all have their stories. One, after he had been wounded and while there was still a chance of saving his sight, insisted on being taken to his General that he might give information about a German mine. When his mission was completed his chance of ever seeing again was ended.

On the way back I saw Joffre walking. I now know why they call him Papa Joffre. He is huge, ungainly, and white and kind. Somehow he made me think of a puppy—he had such an air of surprise. There was a premature touch of spring in the tree-tops. The grand old man of France was aware of it—he looked as though it were his first spring, so young in an ancient sort of way. He was stopping all the time to watch the sparrows flying and the shrubs growing misty with greenness. For all his braid and decorations he looked like an amiable boy of splendid size.

And then I went to Amiens. When I was in the line, it was always my dream to get there. Our senior officers used to play hooky in Amiens and come back with wonderful tales of sheeted beds and perpetual baths. I got there toward evening and was met by a British Staff officer with a car. After dinner I escaped him and wandered through the crooked streets, encountering everywhere my dearly beloved British Tommy, straight out of the trenches for a few hours' respite. As I passed estaminets I could hear concertinas being played and voices singing. It was London and heroism and home-sickness all muddled up together that these voices sang. And they sang just one song. It is the first song I heard in France, when the war was very much younger. When the war is ended, I expect it will be the last. If the war goes on for another thirty years, our Tommies will be singing it—wheezing it out on concertinas and mouth-organs, in rain and sunshine, on the line of march, on leave or in their cramped billets. Invincible optimists that they are—so ordinary, so extraordinary, so good-humoured and mild! I peered in through the estaminets' windows of Amiens—there they sat with their equipment off, their elbows on the table and their small beer before them. And here's what they sang, as so many who are dead have sung before them:

“Après la guerre fini

Tous les soldats parti,

Mademoiselle 'ave a souvenir—

Après la guerre fini.”

After all my wandering along French and American fronts, I was back among my own people.

My final night in Amiens was equally typical. I went to the officers' club and found a sing-song in progress. There was a cavalry major there who had been in the show at Cambrai. He was evidently a hunting-man, for he kept on getting off his hunting calls whenever things threatened to become dull. Most of the music was rag-time, which offended him very much. “Let's sing something English,” he kept on saying. So we gave him “John Peel,” “Hearts of Oak,” “Drink to me only with thine Eyes”—and he went to bed happy.

I had a good fast car, so using Amiens as our base we struck into the Aisne, Oise, and Somme, covering a good many kilometres a day. In these districts the Huns were masters a year ago—and now we are ploughing. The enemy withdrew from these districts last March. Nearly all the demolition is wilful, and very little of it is due to shell-fire. In town after town scarcely a house is left standing—everything is gutted. The American Red Cross is trying to do something to alleviate this distress. It was in a ruined château I found the Smith College Unit and, much to my surprise, Miss W. from Newark, who had just received a letter from M. She was wanting to go to Amiens, so we put her in the car and took her back with us.

I'm longing to get to England to read all your letters. I feel quite out of touch. To-morrow I shall be in London.

I was in Paris when the Huns were overhead, and saw one of them come down. The calmness of the people was amazing. There was no dashing for the Métro or other funk holes; only a contemptuous cheeriness. The French are great.

XXX

London

February 18, 1918

To-day I have made a start on my book Out to Win, and miss you very much. It's quite a difficult thing, I find, to really concentrate on literary work in a strange environment. I wish I could take a magic powder and find myself back in my own little study, with my own little family, till the book is written.

Heaps of people I met in France were returning to America, and promised to telephone you to say they had seen me.

I stumbled across a most inspiring conversation which I overheard the other day, and which, if I had time, I would work into a story, entitled “His Bit.”

I was sitting in front of two women on a bus.

“Well,” said one, “when they told me that Phil was married, you could 'ave knocked me darn wiv a feather.”

It transpired that Phil was a C3 class man, no good for active service. He had met a girl, turned out into the streets by her parents because she was about to have a child by a soldier now dead, whom she had not married. Phil, without asking her any questions, did his “bit”—led her off and married her right away because he was sorry for her.

“And she ain't a wicked girl,” said one of the good ladies on the bus. “She didn't mean no harm. She was just soft-like to a Tommy on leave, I expect. It was 'ard lines on 'er. But that Phil—my goodness, he'll make 'er a good 'usband. Is the child born? I should just fink so. 'E's that proud, she might be 'is own dawter. 'E carries 'er raund all over the plaice, Lord bless yer. And 'is wife's people, they can't make too much of 'im. No, 'e's not strong—a C 3 man. I thought I told yer. She 'as ter work to 'elp 'im along. But between 'em——There! I'm 'ats h'orf to Phil. They're a bloomin' pair of love-birds.”

I like to think of Phil, don't you? I like to know that chaps like him are in the world. He couldn't fight the Germans; but he could play the man by a dead soldier.

That's a little bit of real life to help you along. Now I'm going to knock off and rest.

XXXI

London

February 24, 1918

I'm not spending much time on letter-writing just at present. From morning till night, just as I did when I was writing The Glory of the Trenches, I shove away at my new book. I am most anxious to get it creditably finished and soon. The weather is getting quite ripping for the Front and I'm keen to be back in time for the spring offensive.

You'll be pleased to know that, under my encouragement, your youngest son has broken out into literature. He did it while I was away in France. And the result is extraordinarily fine. He's managed to fling the spirit of his job on paper—it lives and gets you. When they are asked at the end of a patrol what they have been doing, they answer, “Pushing Water”—so that he's made that answer his title.

When I took the manuscript to W., he said: “But haven't you another brother? What's he doing? Where's his manuscript? And what about your mother and sister in America, and your sister in Holland? Don't tell me that they're not all writing?”

At that moment I felt a deep sympathy for Solomon, who I'm sure must have been a publisher. Only a publisher would say so tiredly: “Of making many books there is no end.”

On Tuesday another beastly birthday is due me—but I shan't say anything about it. I shall commence my new lease of life with a meat-card in my hand and no prospect of being really fully fed till I get back to France. For the first time England is feeling a genuine shortage. She isn't particularly annoyed at being rationed, but the worry you have over finding out how much you are allowed to eat and where and when, causes people a good deal of trouble. My own impression is that there is plenty of food in England at present, but that we want to conserve it in order to be able to lend America our tonnage.

XXXII

London March 31, 1919

Below my window, as I write, I can hear the stirring of the Strand. Newsboys are calling the latest papers, motor-horns hoot, and the million feet of London, each pair with their own separate story, clatter against the pavement. What a world! How do we ever get tired of living! Every day there are new faces, bringing new affections and adventure, new demands for tenderness and strength. These footsteps will go on. They will never grow quiet. A thousand years hence they will clatter along these pavements through the miracle of re-creation. Why do we talk of death and old age? It is not true that we terminate. Even in this world the river in whose movement we have our part still goes on—the river of opinions, of effort, of habitation. The sound of us dies faint up the road to the listener who stands stationary; but the fact that at last he ceases to hear us does not mean that we have ceased to exist—only that we have gone farther. How arbitrary we are in our petty prejudices against immortality! God hears more distinctly the travellers to whom men have ceased to listen. Nothing to me is more certain than that we go on and on, drawing nearer to the source of our creation through the ages. Just as I came home to you after so many risks, such suffering, elation, bloodshed, so through the unthinkable adventure of time we journey home to our Maker. Going out of sight is sad, as are all partings. But I can bear to part now in a way that I could not before I saw the heavens open in the horror of war. I have ceased to be afraid of the unguess-able, and better still, I have lost my desire to guess. Not to stand still—to press onwards like soldiers—that is all that is required of us. I have heard men talk about world-sorrows, but if you trace them back, our sorrows are all for ourselves—they are a personal equation. To develop one's personality in the remembering of others seems to me to be the only road to happiness. All this talk—why? Because of the footsteps beneath my window!

The leave train has just arrived at Charing Cross from France. It steamed across the Thames with the men singing “The Land where the Bluebells grow.” There was laughter and longing in their singing.

XXXIII

Bath

March 24, 1918

Here I am with Mr. Lane, spending the weekend. It's a wonderful spring Sunday—no hint of war or anything but flowers and sunshine. An hour ago I halted outside the newspaper office and read the latest telegrams of the great German offensive. It seemed like the autumn of 1914, reading of death and not being a part of it. They'll not take very long in letting me get back to my battery now. One's curiously egotistic—I feel, if only I were out there, that with my little bit of extra help everything would go well.

Yesterday we went to Batheaston Manor, a fine old Jacobean house, to tea—the kind of house that one has dreamt of possessing. There were high elms with rooks cawing and green lawns with immaculately gravelled paths. Inside there were broken landings and rooms with little stairs descending, and panelling, and pictures—everything for which one used to care. The late Belgian Minister to England, Count de la Laing, was there—a sad, courteous man. As we walked back with him to Bath along the canal, he remarked casually that all the art treasures in his château outside of Brussels had been shipped to Germany.

We spent the afternoon seeing the King's pictures—mostly Gainsboroughs—which have been brought to Bath from Buckingham Palace. From here we went to tea with an old lady, Miss Tanner, who rode on her lonesome through Persia many years ago and consequently has gained a Lady Hester Stanhope reputation and, what is more important, a splendid selection of Eastern rugs and silverwork. After that we walked home by way of the great crescent which forms the scene in The School for Scandal.

An odd day to dodge in between experiences of European war! I have to pinch myself awake to remember what is happening at this moment in the Front-line trenches. Probably within a few weeks I shall be there—and feeling very much more contented with myself than I do now.

XXXIV

London March 31, 1918

Eric is with me. I am very glad to have him for my last days in England, and I do hope that Reggie may get here in time to see me. He's ordered south in two weeks' time, but I may be in France by then. I report at Canadian Headquarters to-morrow, and will probably be sent straight down to camp, and from there to France within two weeks.

Have you seen General Currie's stirring message to the Canadians, saying that he expects them to die to a man if, by so doing, they can push the Huns back? This summer will see the biggest of all the battles. I'm wildly excited and longing to get back. There'll be some of the old glamour about this new fighting—it's all in the open. We've got away from trench warfare at last. The beasts are all over the country which we fought for and have recaptured since 1916. They've destroyed for a second time all the reconstruction work that I saw in the devastated areas. I'm wondering if all the girls got out in time. There were so many American girls there.

Don't you dear people get down in the mouth when I'm again at the Front. It's where I've wanted to be for a great many months—ever since I recovered. To be able to go back now, when there's really something doing, is very fitting. I should have been wasting my time, perhaps, during the inactivity of the winter, if I'd been sitting in dug-outs when I might have been writing Out to Win. But no man, whatever his capacities, is wasting his time in fighting at this hour of crisis. I've been made ashamed by the excuses I've heard put up for various quitters who have taken bomb-proof jobs. I'm in terror lest I should be confused with such. Heaven knows, I'm no fonder of killing or of being killed than anyone else, but there are times when everything decent responds to the demand of duty. I shall absolutely be immensely happy to be a man again, taking my chances. I know that you will be glad for me. If you hadn't known for certain that I was going back, you'd have been making excuses for me in your hearts during these last five months. So smile and be proud. And whatever happens, go on being proud and smiling. Your job is to set an example. That's your contribution towards winning the war.

It's past midnight, and I go to camp to-morrow. I'll let you have a cable when I go to the Front—so you needn't be nervous.

XXXV

In Camp. England April 4, 1918

I got down here last night and reported back this morning. I found the General of my Division had already applied for me, so I am going back to my old Brigade at the beginning of this week—on the Sunday, I think. To-day is Wednesday, so I haven't lost much time in getting into action. Probably I shall go up to London to-morrow for a two days' leave and meet Eric.

There's just a chance that Reggie may be with us as well, for I've sent him a telegram to say that I'm going to France.

And now, as you may imagine, I am at last happy and self-respecting. I'm going to be a part of the game again and not a pretence-soldier. What's more, I'm going to go straight into a real battle—the biggest of the war. It's really splendid and I feel childishly elated.

Well, I've had a run for my money if any man ever had. The good times in England, France, and America will be worth remembering when I'm again in the fighting. I contrast in my mind my present mood with that of the first time when I went out—I was very much afraid then; now I'm extraordinarily happy. I've learnt to appreciate the privilege of being in the glory and the heroism. I'm more pleased than if I had won a decoration, that my Colonel should have asked for my return at the first possible moment. It proves to me something which one often doubts—that I really am some good out there.

Keep your tails up, my dear ones, and don't get worried. This line is only to let you know the good news.

XXXVI

London April 6, 1918

I'm the happiest person in London to-day at the thought of my return. This is quite unreasonable, when I sit down to calculate the certain discomfort and danger. I can't explain it, unless it is that only by being at the Front can I feel that I am living honourably. I've been self-contemptuous every minute that I've been out of the line. I began to doubt myself and to wonder whether all my protestations of wanting to get back, were not a camouflage for cowardice. I can prove to myself that they weren't now. “The Canadians will advance or die to a man,” were the words that General Currie sent to his troops. Isn't it magnificent to be included in such a chivalrous adventure? I don't think you'll read about the Canadians retiring.

Whatever happens I've had a grand romance out of life—there's nothing of which to complain. I owe destiny no grudge. The world has been kind. I don't think I shall get killed; I never have thought that. But if I am, it will be as fine an ending to a full day's work as heart could desire.

I think I'm younger than I ever was. I no longer know satiety. The job in front of me fills all my soul and mind. I'm going to prove to myself and others that my books are not mere heroic sentiment. Going out a second time, despite the chances to hang back, will give a sincerity to what I've been trying to say to America. Heaps of people would think it brutal to want so much to go where men are being slaughtered—but it isn't the slaughtering that attracts, it's the winning of the ideal that calls me.

C. has command of my battery now. He's a fine chap. You remember how he left London before his leave was up, “because he wanted to be among men.” That's the sort he is, and I admire him.

XXXVII

London April 14, 1918

We're sitting together in the little flat at Battersea, and Reggie is with us. It's Sunday afternoon. To-morrow morning early I set out for France. The little party wanted me to sleep here to-night so that they could get up about 6 a.m. and see me off. I wouldn't have that. So we're going to say good-bye comfortably to-night and the boys will sleep with me at a hotel just outside the station.

You can't guess how glad I am at the thought of going back. I was afraid I should never be a fighting man again. Now that I'm once more to be allowed to do my bit I feel extraordinarily grateful. I have the silly feeling that just one more man might make all the difference at such a crisis, and I'm jealous lest, when so many are being called upon for an exaggerated display of heroism, I should lose my chance. I know now why soldiers sing when they go out to war—they're so proud that they have been chosen for the sacrifice.

The boys came down to camp with me and lived near to the camp. I took an anti-gas defence course before re-joining in France. Friday night we came up to town and we've had a very jolly time.

Well, dears, we've lived a happy crowded life since I was wounded, and we've each one of us learnt more about the glory of this undertaking.

XXXVIII

France April 21, 1918

I've been back at the Front six days. This is the first opportunity I have had to write. I left England last Monday, having spent Saturday and Sunday in London with the boys. Major H. came up to give me a send-off and we had a very gay time. Saturday evening, after dinner and a theatre, we returned to Battersea and all found beds in one or other of the flats. On Sunday evening we slept at a hotel next to the station so that I might be sure of catching the early morning train. We managed to get a room with three beds in it, and so kept all together as in the old days. By 5 a.m. we were up and stirring. P. and L. walked in on us as we were having breakfast, and S. met us on the platform. They all seemed quite assured that they would never, never see me again—which makes me smile. I suppose they all had visions of grey waves of Germans deluging our infantry by force of numbers, while the gunners were left far in front, trying to stem the tide. That is what we all hope for. It's the kind of chance we dream about; but it hasn't happened yet.

Monday afternoon I was in France and slept at the Base that night. Early Tuesday morning I was on the move again, passing Red Cross trains packed with wounded and trucks crammed with ordnance. I couldn't help comparing this return to the Front with my first trip up. We had a good time playing cards and recalling the old fights—we were like schoolboys coming back for the holidays. There wasn't one of us who wasn't wildly excited at the thought of being a part of the game again. This was rather strange, if you come to consider it, for each of us had been wounded at least once and knew the worst of what war could do to us—yet fear was the emotion most remote from us. We were simply and sheerly glad to be going into the thick of it; our great fear had been that our fighting days were ended.

By 2 p.m. we were dumped out at a town through which I used to ride last summer. Here we had to report to the Provost Marshal for further transport orders. He told me that I should have to go to the Corps Reinforcement Camp. I didn't intend to do that, so waited till he was engaged on the phone and then made my escape. Taking the baggage I could carry, I beat my way back to my old battery on foot and in lorries. I was just coming into the wagonlines when I met Major C., who now commands us. I think he had been lonely for some of the old faces; he went wild with delight. I had a magnificent welcome back. On the spur of the moment he made me a present of his own charger and took me up to the guns with him, where we arrived in time for a very late tea, within thirty-six hours of my leaving England.

The day after that I went forward to do my 24-hour spell at the observing station. When I saw my first Hun after so long an absence, I felt more like hugging him than trying to kill him. Of course I had to do the latter, and had a very nice little strafe. I wrote you a fine long letter up there and somehow lost it. So this is my second attempt.

Don't get nervous about me. Everything is quite all right with us and I'm having a real holiday after my feverish literary spasms. But a lot of familiar faces are absent.

XXXIX

France April 22, 1918

You would hardly believe our peaceful state of mind unless you could drop in on us for an hour. You, in America, are evidently very worked up about us, and picture us as in desperate conditions. Don't worry, we've got our tails up and are happy as sand-boys. There's nothing of the grimly set faces about our attitude such as you imagine. We're too confident to be grim; war is actually, from our point of view, a gigantic lark. It must sound silly to you, I know, but I love to hear the screaming of the shells in the darkness and the baying of the guns. It's like a pack of wolves being chased through the night by bloodhounds.

I hadn't been back two days before they got the rumour at the wagon-lines that I was wounded—a little previous, I thought it. I call that wishing a blighty on me.

I've just come back from a trip across one of our old battlefields. We're in the Hun support-trenches, behind us is his Front line, then No Man's Land with its craters and graves, and behind that the Front line from which we jumped off. You can trace everything plainly and follow the entire attack by the broken wire and blown-in dug-outs. We're still filled with amused contempt for the Hun on our part of the Front.

We were discussing chaplains the other day—the way some of them have failed us in this war. One of the officers told a story of Grannie M., one of our First Division majors. A chaplain, who never went farther than the wagon-lines, was always saying how much he'd like to see the Front. Grannie called his bluff and took him for a trip into one of the warmest spots. The chaplain kept dodging and crouching every time a shell fell within a hundred yards. Each time Grannie, standing quietly silent, waited for him to get up and renew the journey. At last the chaplain flopped into a shell-hole and refused to come out. Grannie, who is a big man and well over six foot, grinned down at him despisingly. “Priest,” he said, “if I thought I had half the pull with Christ that you say you have, not all the shells in France would make me lie as flat as that.” Later another chaplain came to that brigade. No one would give him house-room. He went off and slept where he could; he never came near the officers, but he haunted the men at the forward guns. When the brigade moved out to another sector, he procured an old skate of a horse and trailed along at the rear of the line of march like a hungry dog. The new Front proved to be a warm one; there were many casualties, but the chaplain was always on his job, especially when the shells were falling. From somewhere he got the money to start a canteen for the men, which he ran himself. When no one else had cigarettes, he could supply them. At last even the officers had to come to him. He finished up by being the most popular chaplain the brigade had ever had, honoured by everyone from the colonel down. There are your two types of army chaplains: the one who plays the game, the other who issues season tickets to heaven, but is afraid of travelling on them himself.

XL

France April 26, 1918

I It is now over a week since I have been back with my battery, and it seems as though all that trip along the American line and the rush back to New York had never happened. I'm sitting in a little “house” in a deep chalk trench. The house is made of half-circles of corrugated iron; there's an anti-gas blanket hanging at one end and at the other a window made of oiled calico. Up one corner are the maps, scales, and office papers; pinned on boards is a four-foot map of the entire English front. My sleeping bag is stretched on an old French spring mattress, which was brought here some time ago by the Huns. From the walls hang a higgledy-piggledy of trench coats, breeches, tunics. This is the place in which we work out our ranges, play cards, have our meals, and rest when we're back from doing forward work.

You can walk for miles where we are without ever being seen, if you follow the various systems of Hun and British trenches, for we're plumb in the heart of an old battlefield. The only landmarks left to guide one are the craters as big as churches—records of mines that have been sprung—and little rows of lonely graves. At night when the moon is up, this country creates the curious ghostly illusion of being an endless alkali desert, beaten into billows by the wind. The shells go shrieking over it and wreaths of mist wander here and there like phantoms. Destruction can create a terrible pretence and caricature of beauty. I wish you might visit such a place just once so as to get an idea of where our lives are spent.

Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different. We're having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we're as amused by the Hun as ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him. That is the attitude of every British soldier that I've met. We're as happy and unconcerned as children. There's one chap here who's typical of this spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event. He's the raiding officer of a certain battalion, and is known as “Battling Brown”—though Brown is not his real name. He has a little company of his own, consisting of seventy men. He's been in over a hundred raids on the Hun Front line and has only had two of his men killed in a year. A short while ago he went across with his raiders and captured three Germans; on the return journey across No Man's Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them. He led his men safely back to our lines and then set out again alone on a private excursion into the Boche territory. By dawn he once more returned, bringing back four prisoners single-handed. You might picture such a man as a kind of Hercules, but he isn't. He's thin, and tall, and fair, and high strung. His age, I should guess, is about twenty-two.

Far away in the distance I can hear the pipers playing. It always makes me think of Loch Lomond and when we were little tads. How green and quiet and cool those days seem now—the long rides across the moors and down the glens, the bathing in little mountain streams, the walks in the sad twilights. There are so many happy memories I have to thank you for. You were very wise and generous in the way you planned my childhood. I'm less than a fortnight back at the Front, but I'm already falling into the old habit of happy retrospect. We don't live here really. Our souls are in France only for brief and glorious and intense intervals—during the moments of attack and repulse. The rest of the time we're away in the green valleys of remembered places, watching the ghosts who are the shadows of what we were.

My groom is a boy named Gilpin. The name has proved his downfall. He galloped my horse on the hard road the other day, which is forbidden. A colonel caught him going full tilt, stopped him and took his name. When the severities seemed ended this innocent young party asked the colonel to hold his horse while he mounted—so now he's up on an extra charge of insolence.

Army discipline is in many ways silly and old maidish. Here's a chap who's faithful, well conducted, and honest. He's likely to get a heavier punishment for asking a superior officer to hold his horse than if he'd been drunk and uproarious.

XLI

France April 28, 1918

It's funny to recall the different graveyards among the shell-holes that I've learnt to call home. Once life was so definitely focused—much too definitely for my patience. It seemed as though I was rooted and planted for all eternity. It never seemed to me then that I should ever find the sacrificial opportunity or be stirred to any prophetic exaltations. It's wonderful the way the angel of Death, as discovered in war, can give one visions of limitless nobilities, each one of which is attainable and accessible.

I'm by myself at the Battery. It's late afternoon, and a thunderstorm is brewing. The room is dark (I mean the dug-out); I feel as though it were November instead of April. What a queer life this is. In one way I have not had so much idleness since I was in hospital—then comes a burst of physical strenuosity out of all proportion to one's strength. Things happen by fits and starts; you never know what is going to happen next.

It's intensely still. The stillness is made more noticeable by the booming of an occasional gun.

The whole hope and talk of our chaps is the Americans—what they're going to do, when they're going to start doing it, and what kind of a moral they will have. I hear the wildest rumours of the numbers they have in France—rumours which I know to be untrue since my tour along the American lines. You will have read the manuscript of Out to Win long before this letter reaches you. I wonder what you all think of it and whether you like it. It was written in a breathless, racing sort of fashion. I sat at it from morning till last thing at night. All my desire was to do my duty as regards the Americans and then to get out here before the big show started. I managed things just in time. I don't remember much of what I wrote—only a picture of Domremy and another of Evian and Nancy. I hope it was as good as you expected.

There are things one lives through and sees now which seem ordinary but which to future ages will figure as stupendous. If one can record them now in just that spirit of ordinariness which constitutes their real wonder, they will together give an accurate portrait of Armageddon. My nine months out of the line began to give me a little perspective—I began to see the awful marvellousness of some of the scenes that I had lived through. Now, like the mist which I see hanging above the Hun Front line, a curtain of normality is blotting out the sharp abnormal edges of my landscape.

This war, at the distance which removes you from it, must seem a filthy and brutal kind of game. It is all of that. But it's more than that. The game was not of our inventing—it was thrust on us. We are not responsible for the game; but we are responsible for the spirit in which we play it. The fine, clear, visionary attitude of our chaps redeems for us the horror and pathos of the undertaking.

It will be towards the end of May when this arrives and you'll be off to the lakes and the mountains. I wonder where. I suppose we'll still be plugging along, sending death over into Fritz's lines and receiving it back.

XLII

France May 2, 1918

Here I am up forward again on my shift. I'm sitting in a hole sunk beneath the level of the ground, with a slit that just peeps out across the dandelions to the Hun Front line. From here I can catch any movement in the enemy back-country without being seen myself. Below my O.P. there is a deep dug-out to which I can retire in the event of enemy shelling; if one exit gets blown in, there's a second from which I can make good my escape. On each fresh trip to this place I find a new gem of literature left behind by one or other of the telephonists. Last time it was a priceless kitchen masterpiece by Charles Garvice, entitled The Triumphant Lover; this time it's an exceedingly purple effort by Victoria Cross, entitled Five Nights. So you see I do not allow my interest in matters intellectual to rust.

There are many things of interest that I should like to tell you, but the consciousness that the censor is for ever at my elbow prevents. Did I ever tell you the story of the censor whom I met on the train from Boulogne, when I was returning to the line in January 1917? If I happened to tell it to you, the gentleman who uninvited shares all my letters with you hasn't heard it, and I'm sure his curiosity must be pricked by this time—so here goes.

It was after that splendid leave in London which you came over from America to share with me. The train from Boulogne to the Front was the usual draughty affair, half the windows out, no heating system, no means of getting anything to eat for goodness knows how many hours. I picked out the least disreputable carriage and found that a gunner colonel was snuggled up in one corner and a pile of rugs, pillows, hot-water bottles, eatables, etc., in another. Just as the train was starting the owner of all these effeminate luxuries hopped in and commenced to make himself comfortable. He was nearer fifty than forty. His nose was inflamed and heavily veined, either from drink, dyspepsia, or both. His rank was that of a lieutenant. His social grade that of a post-office assistant, I should fancy. His uniform fitted abominably, and his appearance was as unsoldierly as can well be imagined. He looked like a loose-living spider.

We hadn't been moving very long when he started to unwrap his packages and to gorge himself. He ate steadily like one whose life depended on it. The colonel and I had forgotten to bring anything, so we had the joy of watching.

In our chilly misery we became human and began to talk. The conversation became reminiscent of the numerous offensives. The sloppy lieutenant with the drooping walrus moustaches who sat opposite to us, persistently laid claim to a more thorough knowledge of attacks that we had been in than we did ourselves. He puzzled us; we couldn't picture him as a combatant. Quite haphazard one of us—I think it was the colonel—commenced to damn censors as chaps who sat safely behind the lines and spied on fighting-men's private affairs. The lieutenant became very hot in the censors' defence. He tried to prove the necessity for them by quoting the case of a lieutenant named N., who had sent back captured aeroplane photos to his friends. I happened to know N. and that he was going to be tried by court-martial for his indiscretion, so grew loud in proclaiming my contempt for the fellow safely behind the lines who had caught him. We were particularly annoyed, because N. was a plucky soldier.

Our friend in the corner took my remarks extremely personally. To show his resentment of me, he pointedly offered the colonel some of his fodder. At last he said very haughtily, “It may interest you to know that I am the censor and am at present going up the line to give evidence against Lieutenant N. at his trial.” Just at that moment the train stopped at a station. He blinked through the window with his shortsighted eyes, trying to read the name “This is M., I think,” he said; “if it is, we stop here ten minutes and get time to stretch our legs.”

I looked out of the window helpfully. “It is M.,” I told him. It wasn't. He got out and commenced to walk up the platform. Almost immediately the train started to pull out. He made a wild crab-wise dash for the carriage-door, but the colonel and I were hanging to it on the inside. When we were safely on our journey, we shared up his pillows, rugs, hot-water bottles, and eatables between us, and had a comparatively pleasant journey. For once we thanked God for the censor.

It's tea-time at home. You've probably come in from a walk and are smoking a cigar at the family oak-table. I wish I could pop in on you.

Oh, our latest excitement! We received our new gramophone last night with about thirty of the latest records!

You'll be glad to know that I now have my old batman back. He's the man who took me out when I was wounded and was so tender to me on the way to the hospital. That memory of his tenderness is rather embarrassing, for I can't bring myself to strafe him the way I ought to. I can always see the fellow's concern when he thought that I was done for. Now that he's got me back he acts as though I were still a very weak and indiscreet person who had to be coaxed and managed. I have the feeling in his presence of being perpetually in pyjamas and in bed. He has the advantage of me, to put it in a nutshell.

XLIII

France May 3, 1918

It's early morning. I'm still sitting in the little dug-out with the slit that looks towards the Hun Front line. Everything but the immediate foreground is blanketed in heavy mist at present. I can hear bombing going on somewhere—but I can also hear a lark singing near to the sun, high overhead. The clumps of dandelions are still sleeping. They haven't opened—they're green instead of yellow. The grass sparkles with little drops of dew, more beautiful than the most costly diamonds. With the first of the dawn I read a story by Tolstoy; since then I've been sitting thinking—thinking of you and of the sleeping house in Newark, which will soon be disturbed by your bath-water running, if you still rise early; and thinking how strange it is that I should be here in the greatest war in history. We planned to do such different things with our lives. My first dream was to become extremely wise. At Oxford there seemed no limit to the amount of knowledge I could acquire; it seemed only a matter of patience and perseverance. Then that dream went, and I wanted to save the world. I'm afraid one has to be a little aristocratic towards the world before he can conceive of himself as capable of saving it or of the world as requiring saving. The aristocratic touch grew on me and I decided to do my saving not by touching people, but by writing poetry for the few who would understand. It wasn't half such good poetry as I thought it was at the time, and it never could have re-made anything. Disappointed in that and because I had now committed myself to a literary way of life, I took to writing novels, which nobody wanted to publish, read, or buy. Then, because I had to live somehow, I entered into the commercial end of publishing. There was always the shadow of a dream which I pursued even then in my spare hours; it was the dream that saved me and led me on to write The Garden Without Walls. But the shadow was growing fainter when this war commenced. And here I am, human at last, all touch of false aristocracy gone, peeping out across the grass wet with the dew of May, beneath which lie the common clay heroes who have died for democracy. How noiselessly these men gave up their lives and with how little consciousness of self-appreciation. They rather put us to shame—we privileged dawdlers in our haunted minds. They recognized the one straight thing to do when the opportunity presented itself; they did it swiftly and unreasoningly with their might. They didn't write about what they did; for them the doing was sufficient. I think I shall always be a humble man after such companionship, if I survive. I see life in courageous vistas of actions now; formerly I was like Hamlet—I thought myself into a green sickness. Marriage and children, a home and family love are the best that anyone can extract from life. There have been years when I didn't like my kind.

Out of the many things that have come to me in the past six months I am particularly glad of little Tinker's friendship—P.'. baby. She's not two yet, but we were real pals. She would never go to sleep until I had kissed her in her cot “Good-night.” First thing in the morning she would be beside my bed, tugging at the clothes and ordering me to “Det up.” Since I've been gone they've had to ring the bell and pretend that I'm just entering the hall, so that they may make her go to sleep contented. When they ask her, “Where's Con?” she reaches up to the window and points. “Dorn walk in park,” she says. They talk about the love of a woman keeping a man straight, but I don't think it's to be compared with the love of a little child. You can't lie to them.

The sharp rat-a-tat of the machine guns has started; but the mist is too thick for me to see what is happening——It's nothing; it's died down.

In an hour I shall be relieved, and shall return to the guns and post this letter. It will reach you when? Sometime in June, I expect, when the summer is really come and you're wearing your cool dresses. I can see you going out in the early morning to do your shopping.

XLIV

France May 7, 1918

I am sitting in my bed—my sleeping-sack, I mean—which is spread out on the red-tiled floor of a funny little cottage. There isn't much of the floor left, as four of the other officers are sharing the room with me. Coming in through the window is the smell of sweet myrtle, old-fashioned and quiet; from far away drifts in the continual pounding of the guns and, strangely muddled up with the gunfire, the multitudinous croaking of frogs. I'm having an extraordinary May month of it in lovely country, marching through the showers, getting drenched and drying when the sun deigns to make an appearance. After being off a horse for so long, I'm in the saddle for many hours every day.

I am glad that you all feel the way you do about my returning to the Front. I was sure you wouldn't want me to be out of these great happenings. My fear, when I was in England this spring, was the same as I had when I first joined—that fighting would all-be ended before I got into the line. No fear of that; I think we're in for another two years of it. There's hot work ahead—the hottest of the entire war. Oddly enough my spirits rise as the struggle promises to grow fiercer. I don't know why, unless it is that as the action quickens one has a chance of giving more. There's nothing sad about being wounded or dying for one's country. In this war one does so much more than that—he dies for the whole of humanity.

Outside my window a stretch of hedges runs down to a little brook. Ducks, geese, cocks and hens make farmyard noises from dawn till last thing at night. Above all the peace and quiet, the distant guns keep up their incessant murmur. What a variety of places are likely to shelter me before the summer is ended—woods, ditches, open fields, trenches. It's all in the game and is romance of a sort. I'm sunburnt and hard. I feel tremendously alive.

Once again all the striving and ambition of literary success has vanished. I'm only a subaltern—and far prouder to be that than a writer. I'm estimated by none but my soldiering qualities and power to show guts. We were lawyers, engineers, business-men—now we're soldiers and inquire nothing of each other's past.

A thrush has started singing; he's in the willows that stand by the brookside. The planes go purring overhead, but he doesn't care. He goes on singing towards the evening sun as though his heart knew nothing but joy. He will be here singing long after we have passed upon our way.

Don't get worrying about my safety. You're sure to be feeling nervous at the wrong times, when I'm perfectly safe. Just feel glad that I'm allowed to be here, and don't look ahead.

XLV

France May 14, 1918

I'm afraid you'll be feeling that I've neglected you. Whenever I miss a mail I have the reproachful picture of the disappointed faces of you three at the early morning breakfast—so it isn't wilful neglect. I've had no time, for reasons which I can't explain. In this way of life one has to snatch the odd moments for those he loves best and to break off when the sterner obligations intrude themselves.

I'm in a beautiful part of the country at present—it must be beautiful, for it is providing us with three ducks for dinner to-night. I doubt whether you could get three all at once in Newark. Moreover, we can get all the fresh cream and butter that we like. Of course this won't last. Any morning we may wake up to find ourselves back on iron rations—bully-beef and hard tack. But while it lasts we make the most of it. The most ripping attraction to me is something that you'll scarcely credit. The willow-groves are full of nightingales. As you go back to your billets after midnight and the guns make lightning through the grill-work of the trees, you see the little brown fellows with their throats quivering, pouring out their song of love and spring. When you've crept into your sleeping-sack, you lie awake listening—thinking of another world where love and life were once so certain.

XLVI

France May 18, 1918

This is the third day that I have planned to write you. Perhaps I may be able to do so this time.

I have just been reading a letter from a nurse out in Palestine describing the little wooden crosses above fallen British soldiers which now star the Mount of Olives. The poetry of the ordinary crops out everywhere to-day; we are living on higher levels than we realize. For hundreds of years the future generations will weave legends round us, making us appear titanic spirit-people, just as we have clothed with almost unearthly splendour the Crusaders of the Dark Ages.

This is a pleasant May evening. The fields are golden with buttercups. Above the singing of the birds I can hear a low droning as of bees among flowers; but the droning is of homing aeroplanes. This is the kind of weather and country in which it would not be unbeautiful to die.

When I went down this morning to the barn in which my section is stationed, I found notice printed on the door, on either side a British and American flag-and underneath a luridly illustrated Sunday magazine selection of extracts from The Glory of the Trenches. A small world, isn't it?

I have been reading a book lately that would interest you; it's by Ford Madox Hueffer and is called On Heaven. It consists of a number of poems written while on active service. He's managed to put down in a rough and tumble of words a good many of our hungers and adorations. I hadn't realized before I read him how very much of the conversation of our soldiers is an exchange of confidences about the women they love or have loved. I believe every man at the Front has a hope of the girl he will be true to some day, and a fear lest——

One of Hueffer's poems on the subject is very beautiful. It starts this way:

“In Chepstow stands a castle;

My love and I went there;

The foxgloves on the wall all heard

Her footsteps on the stair.

The sun was high in heaven

And the perfume in the air

Came from purple cat's valerian—

But her footsteps on the stair

Made a sound like silver music

Thro' the perfume in the air.”

The last verse sums up the dread of many a fighting-man—that all his dreams are only dreams, and that a return to reality may disappoint him:

“And another soldier fellow

Shall come courting of my dear.

And it's I shall not be with her

With my lip beside her ear.

For it's he shall walk beside her

In the perfume of the air

To the silver, silver music

Of her footstep on the stair.”

All the world's idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don't want any heaven that isn't a re-living of the old happy memories.

I find that Hueffer expresses a feeling that many of us have secretly, but which I have never heard any man acknowledge—the feeling that all the remainder of his days he will have to be explaining if he comes to the end of the war alive—almost the feeling that he will have lost his great chance of nobility by not dying. Hueffer's poem is called One Day's List; it's a list of three officers and 270 other ranks of his regiment who were killed in action. It commences:

“My dears,

The rain drips down on Rouen Town,

The leaves drip down

And so the mud

Turns orange brown.”

And it has for its refrain

“But you—at least—are out of it.”

It goes on to tell of the officers who fell, and repeats the reflection which we all have when we gaze on the dead at the end of an attack and know that we ourselves have escaped:

“One wonders why you died.”

And then,

“We never talked of glory,

And each thought a lot of one girl

And waited most days for hours in the rain

Till she came:

But we never talked of Fame——”

And lastly, addressing the dead,

“But we who remain shall grow old,

We shall know the cold

Of cheerless

Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting

Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,

And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces,

And the long ranges of comfortless years

And the long gamut of human fears—

But, for you, it shall be for ever Spring,

And only you shall be for ever fearless,

And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,

And only you, where the water-lily swims

Shall walk along the pathways, thro' the willows

Of your west.

You who went west,

And only you on silvery twilight pillows

Shall take your rest

In the soft sweet glooms,

Of twilight rooms——”

There's the whole of our one and only cowardice in a nut-shell—that we, who have posed as conquerors for a while, will, if we survive, return to the normal things of life to find our spirits unexalted and the commonplace still commonplace.

Out here, where there are corpses in the thistles and “the gas-shells burst like snow,” we can talk of “the silver, silver music of her footsteps on the stair,” but we're mortally afraid that in less exultant moments, when the heart is not so starved for affection, we shall discover that the “silver music” is only the irritating sound of squeaky shoes.

I can't hear from you again for at least six days—a long time to wait! I can't be bothered nowadays to let the mail-clerk sort out the letters: I grab the bag and go through it myself.

There may be an interval between this letter and those that follow. If there is, don't worry yourselves. It is not possible to find the time or place to write under all circumstances.

XLVII

France June 1, 1918

I can't remember when last I wrote you. It isn't always easy to get the time. Recently I've spent a good many hours in the saddle and have been up early in the morning; when work is done the fresh air leaves one too tired for anything but sleep. But you mustn't worry about me. I'm stronger than I've been for months, and tanned to the colour of an Indian.

I have recently met the doctor who did so much to pull me through at the Casualty Clearing Station when I was wounded last June. He's still the same tall, thin, silent man, with the kindest and sternest of faces. His brother, he tells me, is in America on the British Mission, and had informed him of America's immense preparations. Like all the men out here, I found him keenly eager to see the U.S.A. proportionately represented in the Front line. We are holding, and counting on the States to turn the tide dramatically in our favour. Our chaps are to calm and confident of success—out here there's none of the strain and nervousness which are felt by civilians. Our chaps are as philosophical and cheery as ever. “Good old Fritz,” they say, “so he's taken another fifteen miles! Well, it'll be our turn next.” Through defeat and success we carry on quite normally and unperturbed, confident of ultimate victory. The general opinion is that the Hun by his advances is only causing himself a lot of unnecessary trouble, as he'll have a longer distance to run back to Germany.

Here's the first of June and mid-summer approaching when so many pleasant things used to happen—flights to the country, the purchasing of bathing-suits, fishing-nets, maps—the planning of such quantities of family adventures. It would be happy to think that some of these old pleasures might return one day. The longer the war goes on the more impossible it is to conjure up the picture of civilian ways of life or to see oneself as again in the picture. Everything grows blurred except the present, with the early risings, routine, orders, marches, and attacks. To be given our freedom would leave us dazed.

This will probably reach you after you have left New York and settled down for the holidays in some quiet country place. There's only one spot which seems permanent in our family life—the little grey shack among the orchards in the Rockies. My thoughts fly to it very often these hot summer days. I see the lake like a blue mirror, reflecting the mountains and the clouds. I hear the throbbing of the launch. Bruce is barking on the wharf. Figures are moving about the boat-house. We climb the hill together where the brook sings through the flowers and the evening meal awaits us. And afterwards those long sleepy evenings when the dusk comes down and the flowers shine more vaguely, and we talk so endlessly, planning books, retraversing the past, mapping out a road to so many future El Dorados. I can remember these former happinesses without self-torture or regret. The present is so splendid that it outshines all former beauties. I go forward happily, believing that any bend of the future may bring the old kindnesses into view again.

The old haunting dream of Blighty is growing up in me once again—the Blighty we speak of, think of, worship and imagine every hour of the day. It's worth being wounded if only to wake up the first morning in the long white English ward, with the gold-green sunlight dripping in from the leaves through the open windows. These are the exquisite moments of peace and rest which come to one in the midst of warfare. Of such moments within the last year I have had my share; they are happy to remember.

And the war goes on and on. I was so afraid that it would be ended before ever I got back. The fear was needless. I shall be out here at least another year before peace is declared. There are times when I think that the Americans are not so far wrong in their guess when they give themselves “four years to do this job.” The Hun may be desperate; his very energy may be a proof of his exhaustion. But his death struggle is too vigorously successful to promise any very rapid end. Our hope is in America, with her high courage, her sacrifice, and her millions of men. If she had not joined us, we would still stand here chaffingly and be battered till not one of us was left. The last one would die with the smile of victory on his mouth. Whatever happens, they'll never catch any British fighting-man owning that his tail is down. But the thought of the American millions gives us confidence that, though we are wiped out, we shall not have lost. Like runners in a relay race, though we are spent, the pace we have set will enable those who come after us to win in the last lap.

But don't worry about me. I'm having a splendid run for my money, and am far more happy than I deserve.

XLVIII

France June 1, 1918

As per usual when I write to you, I have my nose up against a solitary candle, am hedged in by shadows, and have the stump of a cigarette in my mouth. For days I have been waiting for letters from home, but none has arrived as yet. Either the ship has gone down or some other calamity has happened. I now promise myself that to-morrow there will be a huge package of belated mail for me.

We're travelling very light at present. The first thing I did on my return was to cut down my kit to the barest necessities and send all the balance back to England. It's better to have it safe in London, if out of immediate reach, than to have to abandon it in a ditch or shell-hole. While the summer lasts there are a great number of things that one can do without.

What an unsportsmanly crowd the Germans are! I think more than anything else it will be their lack of fair play that we shall hold against them when war is ended. Yesterday at the Pope's request we were foolish enough to refrain from bombing Cologne, so the Hun took the opportunity to both bomb and shell the Catholics of Paris. It makes one itch to grab a bayonet and go over the top to do him as much damage as opportunity will allow. The Hun is educating us out of our good-humoured contempt into a very deep-seated hatred of him. The other day I was in a forward town recently evacuated by its population. You walked through silent, torn streets, the windows all broken by shells, the doors sagging from their hinges and open. You peered across the thresholds into the houses. In many cases meals were still on the tables, partly eaten and hastily left. A stray cat scurried out into the yard; nothing else stirred. Over the entire death-like silence the summer sun shone down and far away a cuckoo was calling. One gets accustomed to the outward symbols of such tragedies—the broken homes, abandoned security and foregone happiness. The people themselves get used to it. To-day I met a farm-wagon piled high with the household gods, while a peasant woman walked beside with her best hat carried in a paper-bag in her hand. That was very typical—in all the ruin that had befallen a home to still cling to the best hat.

I'm very happy and well, living almost entirely in the open and in the saddle a good part of the day. The part of France I have lived in since my return is by far the cleanest and most beautiful that I have seen on active service. The weather has been golden and glorious. There is none of that fear in our hearts that you must experience for us. We're as certain of victory as we were during the days of the big Vimy advance.

The Army is a nursery organization, full of annoying pomposities and amusing class distinctions. Just at present we're being pestered with continual inspections, when each battery tries to invent some new trick for making itself look smarter. Soldiers, on such occasions, are like a lot of old women at a spring cleaning. The men much prefer killing Boches to being inspected. Burnishing steel, chasing all over the country to buy Brasso, spending fortunes on polish for the harness all seem such a fruitless waste of time when the Huns are hammering our line. But, of course, cleanliness has a moral effect on men who have been long under shell-fire.

This is a discursive sort of letter, and doesn't contain much real news. It's just for remembrance.

XLIX

France June 4, 1918

I've just left the gramophone shrilly declaring that “When he fancies he is past love, it is then he meets his last love and he loves her as he never loved before.” London comes with us to the Front. We hum the tunes of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, and we scheme such splendid times for our return. Leave has opened up again, but by a careful calculation I have discovered that it will take twenty-one years four months and three days till my turn comes round at the present rate of allotments.

Some New York papers have just arrived and an exceedingly ancient cake, but no letters. In the midst of a great offensive it is wonderful that anything gets to us at all. We're as far away from you both in reality and imagination as though we lived in a different world. Our standards of conduct, normality, right living are not your standards—our hopes and fears are all different. Again, as when I first came to the Front, everything civilian seems a tale I have read about. I cannot believe that that person who was in New York last October was really myself. I rather wonder at him and at his capacity for writing about the commonplace events of the present life. Now I couldn't write a line about the war if my life depended on it. I see nothing in perspective except the endless path of duty which leads on ahead as each day introduces itself. To what goal that path leads I sometimes try to guess—to something wonderful and unforeseen, I have no doubt.

I judge from what I read that the entire world which is not at the Front is anxious and depressed. We're just the same as ever—cheery and waiting whatever may befall with a stoicism born of confidence. Our belief in ourselves, our cause, and our ability to win, never wavers. How extraordinarily normal we are you could hardly imagine. The moment our men get out of the trenches they begin to play baseball, football, cricket, etc. There's a big lake near to where we are with red cliffs around it. Here every evening you can see the poised white figures of soldiermen. Last Sunday we held aquatic sports there, and had a fine display of swimming. It's wonderful to see the chaps so happy when you remember that nine-tenths of their companions of this time last year are either wounded or dead. As you may guess, we never in our conversation call attention to this fact, though there can be few, if any, who forget.

There are children where we are at present. It's amusing to see them making friends with our boys. They slip their little paws into the big brown hands and toddle along quite proudly.

I don't see how anyone could help loving our men—they're so simple. Their faults, when you know the hearts which they hide, become endearing. I think, especially when I see them with the French kiddies, “Of such are the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Please thank the donor of the cake which arrived to-day. We're eating it—don't tell her it was dry.

L

France June 7,1918

Here's a glorious summer evening—the end of a perfect day, during which I have done my share in capturing two German spies, who now repose unrestfully in our guard-room.

This morning, when I was leading a hundred mounted men along a road, a terrible thing happened. The road was narrow and on one side of it motor-lorries were standing; on the other side was a little unfenced river. Suddenly and without warning, tearing down the hill ahead of us, came the enemy. The enemy consisted of a pair of mules harnessed to a heavy iron roller. The roller caught my lead-driver and threw him and his two horses to the ground, then it charged on into the mass behind us. Miraculously no bones were broken; we all have nine lives. Those mokes have put us up to a new trick for dispersing enemy cavalry which ought to be effective. Believe me, two mad mules, going thirty miles an hour with an iron roller behind them, are utterly demoralizing. It is impossible for any cavalry in the world to withstand them.

You don't know, can't guess, how letters from home buck me up and keep the lamp of my ideals still burning. There are moments when the mere mechanical side of warfare fills one's mind with an infinite depression. One sees men doing splendid acts, day in day out, like automatons animated by the spring of duty. One almost forgets that there is any human element of choice in the matter, or a difference between fighting and fighting well. When your pages come, I remember—remember that just such affections and human ties bind the hearts of all who are out here to life. I begin to see my chaps as personalities again and not as only soldiers.

Outside the chaps are singing “O my, I don't want to die; I want to go home.” Now they've changed to “Take me Over to Blighty.”

LI

France June 8, 1918

Last night I saw the old lady who nursed me up so that I was fit to come and meet you in London when you all came in 1917 from America. Seeing her again brought back all sorts of memories of the depressions and exaltations of other days. I think I have been both sadder and more happy since the war began than in all the other years of my life. And I used to write about the world not as it is, but about the world as I would have made it, had I been God. Now I'm trying to see things as they are, with the inevitable God shining through them. Here, at the Front, God is everywhere apparent—but not the cathedral God I had imagined—not the majestic God with sublime uplifted eyes which know nothing of finite terror. The God of the Front has brave eyes which have suffered; His mouth is a human mouth, which has known the pain of parting and kisses; His hands are roughened and burnt and bloody; there is the stoop of agony in His shoulders and the hint of a valiant jest in His splendid bearing of defiance. He is one of us. He is us entirely. He is no longer remote and eternal. For us He has again become flesh—He is our comrade; He is the man upon our left and our right hand, who goes into battle with us; He is our dead. We cannot escape Him; the pettinesses of our sins are forgotten in the resemblance of our neighbours to His majesty. Nowadays I cannot think of the poet's Christ, wandering through Galilean lilies in a woman's robes. It's His manly death, His white timeless body on the Cross that I remember. Without Calvary all His words would have been unconvincing and He Himself a dreamer's fancy. It was only on the Cross that Christ became flesh—all that went before is like a lovely legend gradually materializing in the atmosphere of tragedy. God save us from being always happy. It's the chance of being always happy that I dread most after the war. There's a terrible corpulence about happiness which borders very closely on physical grossness. To strive and keep on striving—that is what I want for the world when war is ended, and to have to pay with sacrifice for each advance. I don't think any of us who come back will covet virtue as our goal, save in as far as virtue embraces everything that is meant by manliness. To be virtuous in the original sense was just that—to be physically perfect.

Ah, how greedy I become out here to see some of the sudden qualities which war has called out, transplanted into the civilian world. I so fear that with peace those qualities may be debased and lost.

More than anything else the gramophone makes me remember the old days and the old aims and desires. It's the greatest miracle of the century that Caruso and Harry Lauder and George Robey, with all the best of music and laughter-makers, can step into our dug-out from the point of a needle. When we move, whatever else is left behind, the gramophone always goes. It travels in G.S. wagons, on the foot-board of limbers—in all sorts of ways. We're feeling sentimental; we crank up the canned music. Above the roar of the guns we hear, “All that I want is someone to love me, and to love me well.” We're feeling merry, so we dance to “Arizona.” All the world of forgotten pleasures can come to us through that needle-point. And I—whenever it starts—I see home pictures——

Then in an extraordinarily poignant way I feel earnest to have lived, loved, done something big before I die. Everything already done seems insignificant and worthless. It's the feeling which you once called “divine discontent.”

It's evening, as it always is when I write to you. Next door a little refugee child is chanting his prayers under the direction of his father. One can hear the humming of planes overhead. A funny world! How persistent the religious instinct is, that men should still credit God when their hearts are bankrupt!

Good-night, I'm going to bed now.

LII

France June 12, 1918

With me it's 6.30 in the evening. I'm sitting in a farmhouse overlooking the usual French farmyard. The chickens fly in at the window—also the cats. The window is my own mode of entrance; I feel like a burglar when I enter my “bedroom” in this fashion after midnight. Two other officers share the floor with me—literally the floor, for we use our sleeping-sacks.

There's a little boy about three, with long hair, so that at first we mistook him for a girl, who has become the temporary mascot of the battery. He carries the broken remains of a toy rifle and falls in with the men on parades, holding one of the fellows' hands. He's picked up the detail for “'Shun!” and “Stand at Ease!” and carries out the orders as smartly as anyone, looking terrifically serious about it. The men call him “little sister” on account of his appearance, and make him a great pet. I left him sobbing his heart out to-day when I had to leave him behind after he had fallen in with a squad of riflemen.

There's a genuine little girl who is our friend, of whom I am even fonder. She's a refugee kiddy of about thirteen—slim and pretty as a fairy, with a long corn-gold plait of hair down her back.

As soon as we start the gramophone going she peeps noiselessly as a spirit through the window; then one of us lifts her across the sill and she sits on our knees with her face hidden shyly against our shoulders.

I'm at present reading Gulliver's Travels. That I should be reading them in such different circumstances from any that Swift could have imagined, kindles the art of writing books into a new romance. To be remembered years after you yourself have forgotten, to have men prying into the workings of a brain which has been dust in a shell for two centuries, is a very definite kind of immortality. To be forgotten—that is what we most dread. Never to have happened would not matter; but to have happened, to have walked the world, laughed, loved, created, and then to be treated as though we had not happened, there lies the sting of death. The thought of extinction offends our vanity; we had thought that we were of more consequence to the universe. It doesn't comfort us to be recalled impersonally in the mass, as the men who captured Vimy or thrust the Hun back from some dangerous objective. In the mass we shall go down through history, no doubt, but not as human beings—only as heroes. We would rather be recalled by our weaknesses—as so-and-so who loved a certain girl, who played a good hand of poker, who overdrew his bank-account. Out here, from the moment a man places foot in France, the anonymity of death commences. No one cares who he was in a previous world, what he did for a living, whether he was a failure or a success. None of his former virtues stand to his credit except as they contribute to his soldier-life of the present. None of us talk about our past; if we did, our company would yawn at us. Only the mail arriving at irregular intervals keeps us in knowledge that we once had other personalities. Letters are like ghosts of a world abandoned, tiptoeing through the dream of a sleeper. Between you and us there is a great gulf fixed——Not that we resent it. Someone has to pay a price for the future safety of the world; out of all the ages we have been chosen as the persons. There is nothing to resent,—quite the contrary. Only, now and then creeps in the selfish longing that we may be remembered not as soldiers, but as what we were—in our weakness as well as in our strength.

You're in a country place where I have not been and which I cannot picture. I hope you're all enjoying yourselves. There's no need to worry on my account.

LIII

France June 20,1918

Here I am in the kind of place that William Morris wrote about. My room is in a monastery, from which all but two of the monks have long since fled. The nunnery, in which the rest of the officers are billeted, was long since vacated. A saint was born here, and there used to be pilgrimages to his shrine; now only the two monks remain to toll the bell, play the organ, and to go through all the religious observances. The walls of the room in which I am writing are covered with illuminated prayers. Pinned on the door outside is the list of all the duties for the day. From my window I can see the two faithful ones pacing in the overgrown garden, counting their beads, murmuring their prayers, and behaving in every way as though the war had not commenced. Such despising of external happenings, even though it be mistaken, calls for admiration of sorts.

The country is lovely and green now, all except the immediate battle-line. Birds sing, flowers bloom, and fleecy white clouds go drifting overhead. One takes chance baths in chance-found brooks, and the men spread their tents in the meadows. There's everything that life can offer to tempt us to go on living at present. There are moments so happy that I almost wish that you could be here to share them.

To-day I'm out of touch—no letters have arrived. Perhaps they will overtake us tomorrow. A thrush is singing in the monastery garden and the slow blue twilight is falling. Mingling as an accompaniment to the song of the thrush is the slow continual droning of a plane. The reminders of war are persistent and incessant. Nevertheless, in spite of war, I found a strawberry patch this afternoon and glutted myself.

I see by to-day's paper that a racket has started on the Italian front. The Central Powers are declaring their weakness by striking out in too many directions. We give and we give, but we never break. We're waiting for America and her millions. How long before we can count on them to help us to attack?

It's extraordinary how the belief in America has grown. First of all we said, “She has come in too late"; then, “She'll help us to win more quickly"; and now, “We need her.” If America has done nothing else, she has strengthened our moral all along the line; we fight better because we know that she is behind us.

You're somewhere where the world is intensely quiet. I shall think of you where the world is happy.

LIV

France June 20, 1918

I've just finished reading a big batch of mail, and have had dinner and now sit looking out on the drenched country which is covered with a shabby evening sky. In the church, which adjoins the monastery in which I stay, monks are chanting. They are always chanting. One wonders for what it is that they pray; deeds at any moment, let alone the present, are so much better. I can picture what would happen here if the Germans came. I have caught myself thinking of Marie Odelle; our scenery is similar to that pictured in the play. Strange how one goes to imagination in search of illustrations of reality!

You, at your end, seem to have been having some wildly exciting times with your processions in which the Kaiser has been publicly done away with. It's a phase which all countries go through, I suppose. England did at the beginning of the war. But now we entrain for the Front without bands playing, and do our best not to attract attention. We're a little ashamed of arousing other people's emotions on our behalf. All we want is a “Cheerio and God bless You,” for our good-bye. If we come back, it will be “jolly fine"; and if we don't, “C'est la guerre”—we shrug our shoulders. In either event we see no reason why the feelings should be harrowed of those who stop behind.

After a series of very early morning rises, I have been picturing to myself the day when I once again wake up at the Ritz, with a camouflaged foreigner to bring my breakfast to my pillow and then leave me in peace till twelve o'clock. I wonder now why I ever left my bed in peace times and find myself marvelling at my unnecessary energy. The French patriot who held receptions and did the business of the day while sitting in a bath of milk, had mastered the art of life. Unfortunately, if I remember rightly, he was made a glaring example of sloth by being “done in” while thus pleasurably occupied.

I'm off to do my rounds as orderly officer now. My sergeant is waiting, so, as the men say, “I must ring off.”

LV

France June 23, 1918

Here I sit on a summer's evening in the red-tiled kitchen of an old farmhouse. Immediately under the open window to my right is the inevitable manure-heap—the size of which, they say, denotes the extent of the farmer's wealth. Barn-roofs, ochre-red, shine vividly in the pale gold of the sunset; at the end of the yard the walls fall away, giving the glimpse of an orchard with gnarled, lichen-covered fruit-trees. All kinds of birds are twittering and singing; house-swallows dart and dive across open spaces. In the distance the guns are booming. War affords one strange contrasts of sight and sound. Not many of the peasants have moved away; they have great faith in the Canadians. Every now and then a forlorn group will come trailing down the road between the hedges: an old tumbledown cart, drawn by an old tumble-down horse, piled and pyramided dangerously high with old tumble-down furniture. The people who accompany the vehicle are usually ancient and tumbledown as well. They make me recall someone's description of the Irish emigrants on the St. Lawrence, travelling with “ragged poverty on their backs.” In contrast with these few straggling fugitives, hounded by avaricious fear, is the calm of a country billowy with grain and sociable with the grinning contentment of quite-at-home British Tommies. Everything in their attitude seems to assure the French peasant, “Don't worry, old dear. We're here. Everything's all right.” From barns and houses and bivouacs come the sounds of gramophones, playing selections from quite the latest musical comedies. If you wander back into the fields you will find horsemen going over the jumps, men playing baseball and cricket, officers getting excited over tennis. We even held our Divisional Sports the other day—and this in the midst of the war's greatest offensive. This “'Arf a mo', Kaiser,” attitude of the Canadians would give you some idea of the esteem in which we hold the Hun. Our backs are not against the wall. We still have both the time and the inclination to be sportsmen and to laugh. I'm sure the enemy, grimly obsessed by the idea of breaking our line, never allows himself a moment for recreation, and I should think his balloon-observers, spying on us from the baskets of his distant sausages, must be very chagrined by our frivolity. The papers say, and very probably they're right, that German strategists are far ahead of those possessed by the Allies; but our men have learnt a trick worth all the strategy—they have learnt to laugh both in success and adversity. In this war, I believe we shall find that he who has acquired the habit of a light heart will do the laughing last. I should very much like to know how many gramophones travel with the German Tommies; hardly any, I'll bet. They have their bands with their patriotic music, keeping always before the men the singleness of their purpose. The singleness of their purpose tires them out. On our side of the line patriotism is the last thing you hear about. Thank God, we've got time to forget it.