November 1st, 1916.
My Dearest M.:
Peace after a storm! Your letter was not brought up by the water-wagon
this evening, but by an orderly--the mud prevented wheel-traffic. I was
just sitting down to read it when Fritz began to pay us too much
attention. I put down your letter, grabbed my steel helmet, rushed out
to see where the shells were falling, and then cleared my men to a safer
area. (By the way, did I tell you that I had been made Right Section
Commander?) After about half an hour I came back and settled down by a
fire made of smashed ammunition boxes in a stove borrowed from a ruined
cottage. I'm always ashamed that my letters contain so little news and
are so uninteresting. This thing is so big and dreadful that it does not
bear putting down on paper. I read the papers with the accounts of
singing soldiers and other rubbish; they depict us as though we were a
lot of hair-brained idiots instead of men fully realising our danger,
who plod on because it's our duty. I've seen a good many men killed by
now--we all have--consequently the singing soldier story makes us smile.
We've got a big job; we know that we've got to "Carry On" whatever
happens--so we wear a stern grin and go to it. There's far more heroism
in the attitude of men out here than in the footlight attitude that
journalists paint for the public. It isn't a singing matter to go on
firing a gun when gun-pits are going up in smoke within sight of you.
What a terrible desecration war is! You go out one week and look through
your glasses at a green, smiling country-little churches, villages
nestling among woods, white roads running across a green carpet; next
week you see nothing but ruins and a country-side pitted with
shell-holes. All night the machine guns tap like rivet-ting machines
when a New York sky-scraper is in the building. Then suddenly in the
night a bombing attack will start, and the sky grows white with signal
rockets. Orders come in for artillery retaliation, and your guns begin
to stamp the ground like stallions; in the darkness on every side you
can see them snorting fire. Then stillness again, while Death counts his
harvest; the white rockets grow fainter and less hysterical. For an hour
there is blackness.
My batman consoles himself with singing,
"Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile."
There's a lot in his philosophy--it's best to go on smiling even when
some one who was once your pal lies forever silent in his blanket on a
stretcher.
The great uplifting thought is that we have proved ourselves men. In our
death we set a standard which in ordinary life we could never have
followed. Inevitably we should have sunk below our highest self. Here we
know that the world will remember us and that our loved ones, in spite
of tears, will be proud of us. What God will say to us we cannot
guess--but He can't be too hard on men who did their duty. I think we
all feel that trivial former failures are washed out by this final
sacrifice. When little M. used to recite "Breathes there a man with soul
so dead, who never to himself had said, 'This is my own, my native
land,'" I never thought that I should have the chance that has now been
given to me. I feel a great and solemn gratitude that I have been
thought worthy. Life has suddenly become effective and worthy by reason
of its carelessness of death.
By the way, that Princeton man I mentioned so long ago was killed forty
yards away from me on my first trip into the trenches. Probably G. M'C.
and his other friends know by now. He was the first man I ever saw
snuffed out.
I'm wearing your mittens and find them a great comfort. I'll look
forward to some more of your socks--I can do with plenty of them. If any
of your friends are making things for soldiers, I wish you'd get them to
send them to this battery, as they would be gratefully accepted by the
men.
I wish I could come to _The Music Master_ with you. I wonder how long
till we do all those intimately family things together again.
Good-bye, my dearest M. I live for home letters and am rarely
disappointed.
God bless you, and love to you all.
Yours ever,
CON.