Sunday morning, your first back in Newark. You're not up yet owing to
the difference in time--I can imagine the quiet house with the first of
the morning stealing greyly in. You'll be presently going to church to
sit in your old-fashioned mahogany pew. There's not much of Sunday in
our atmosphere--only the little one can manage to keep in his heart. I
shall share the echo of yours by remembering.
I'm waiting orders at the present moment to go forward with the Colonel
and pick out a new gun position. You know I'm very happy-satisfied for
the first time I'm doing something big enough to make me forget all
failures and self-contempts. I know at last that I can measure up to the
standard I have always coveted for myself. So don't worry yourselves
about any note of hardship that you may interpret into my letters, for
the deprivation is fully compensated for by the winged sense of
exaltation one has.
Things have been a little warm round us lately. A gun to our right,
another to our rear and another to our front were knocked out with
direct hits. We've got some of the chaps taking their meals with us now
because their mess was all shot to blazes. There was an officer who was
with me at the 53rd blown thirty feet into the air while I was watching.
He picked himself up and insisted on carrying on, although his face was
a mass of bruises. I walked in on the biggest engagement of the entire
war the moment I came out here. There was no gradual breaking-in for me.
My first trip to the front line was into a trench full of dead.
Have you seen Lloyd George's great speech? I'm all with him. No matter
what the cost and how many of us have to give our lives, this War must
be so finished that war may be forever at an end. If the devils who plan
wars could only see the abysmal result of their handiwork! Give them one
day in the trenches under shell-fire when their lives aren't worth a
five minutes' purchase--or one day carrying back the wounded through
this tortured country, or one day in a Red Cross train. No one can
imagine the damnable waste and Christlessness of this battering of
human flesh. The only way that this War can be made holy is by making it
so thorough that war will be finished for all time.
Papa at least will be awake by now. How familiar the old house seems to
me--I can think of the place of every picture. Do you set the victrola
going now-a-days? I bet you play Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue.
Please send me anything in the way of eatables that the goodness of your
hearts can imagine--also smokes.
Later.
I came back from the front-line all right and have since been hard at it
firing. Your letters reached me in the midst of a bombardment--I read
them in a kind of London fog of gun-powder smoke, with my steel helmet
tilted back, in the interval of commanding my section through a
megaphone.
Don't suppose that I'm in any way unhappy--I'm as cheerful as a cricket
and do twice as much hopping--I have to. There's something
extraordinarily bracing about taking risks and getting away with
it--especially when you know that you're contributing your share to a
far-reaching result. My mother is the mother of a soldier now, and
soldiers' mothers don't lie awake at night imagining--they just say a
prayer for their sons and leave everything in God's hands. I'm sure
you'd far rather I died than not play the man to the fullest of my
strength. It isn't when you die that matters--it's how. Not but what I
intend to return to Newark and make the house reek of tobacco smoke
before I've done.
We're continually in action now, and the casualty to B. has left us
short-handed--moreover we're helping out another battery which has lost
two officers. As you've seen by the papers, we've at last got the Hun on
the run. Three hundred passed me the other day unescorted, coming in to
give themselves up as prisoners. They're the dirtiest lot you ever set
eyes on, and looked as though they hadn't eaten for months. I wish I
could send you some souvenirs. But we can't send them out of France.
I'm scribbling by candlelight and everything's jumping with the stamping
of the guns. I wear the locket and cross all the time.
Yours with much love,
Con.