November 15th, 1916.
Dear Father:
I've owed you a letter for some time, but I've been getting very little
leisure. You can't send steel messages to the Kaiser and love-notes to
your family in the same breath.
I am amazed at the spirit you three are showing and almighty proud that
you can muster such courage. I suppose none of us quite realised our
strength till it came to the test. There was a time when we all doubted
our own heroism. I think we were typical of our age. Every novel of the
past ten years has been more or less a study in sentiment and
self-distrust. We used to wonder what kind of stuff Drake's men were
made of that they could jest while they died. We used to contrast
ourselves with them to our own disfavour. Well, we know now that when
there's a New World to be discovered we can still rise up reincarnated
into spiritual pirates. It wasn't the men of our age who were at fault,
but the New World that was lacking. Our New World is the Kingdom of
Heroism, the doors of which are flung so wide that the meanest of us may
enter. I know men out here who are the dependable daredevils of their
brigades, who in peace times were nuisances and as soon as peace is
declared will become nuisances again. At the moment they're fine,
laughing at Death and smiling at the chance of agony. There's a man I
know of who had a record sheet of crimes. When he was out of action he
was always drunk and up for office. To get rid of him, they put him into
the trench mortars and within a month he had won his D.C.M. He came out
and went on the spree--this particular spree consisted in stripping a
Highland officer of his kilts on a moonlight night. For this he was
sentenced to several months in a military prison, but asked to be
allowed to serve his sentence in the trenches. He came out from his
punishment a King's sergeant--which means that whatever he did nobody
could degrade him. He got this for lifting his trench mortar over the
parapet when all the detachment were killed. Carrying it out into a
shell-hole, he held back the Hun attack and saved the situation. He got
drunk again, and again chose to be returned to the trenches. This time
his head was blown off while he was engaged in a special feat of
gallantry. What are you to say to such men? Ordinarily they'd be
blackguards, but war lifts them into splendour. In the same way you see
mild men, timid men, almost girlish men, carrying out duties which in
other wars would have won V.C.'s. I don't think the soul of courage
ever dies out of the race any more than the capacity for love. All it
means is that the occasion is not present. For myself I try to analyse
my emotions; am I simply numb, or do I imitate other people's coolness
and shall I fear life again when the war is ended? There is no
explanation save the great army phrase "Carry on." We "carry on"
because, if we don't, we shall let other men down and put their lives in
danger. And there's more than that--we all want to live up to the
standard that prompted us to come.
One talks about splendour--but war isn't splendid except in the
individual sense. A man by his own self-conquest can make it splendid
for himself, but in the massed sense it's squalid. There's nothing
splendid about a battlefield when the fight is ended--shreds of what
once were men, tortured, levelled landscapes--the barbaric loneliness of
Hell. I shall never forget my first dead man. He was a signalling
officer, lying in the dawn on a muddy hill. I thought he was asleep at
first, but when I looked more closely, I saw that his shoulder blade was
showing white through his tunic. He was wearing black boots. It's odd,
but the sight of black boots have the same effect on me now that black
and white stripes had in childhood. I have the superstitious feeling
that to wear them would bring me bad luck.
Tonight we've been singing in parts, Back in the Dear Dead Days Beyond
Recall--a mournful kind of ditty to sing under the circumstances--so
mournful that we had to have a game of five hundred to cheer us up.
It's now nearly 2 a.m., and I have to go out to the guns again before I
go to bed. I carry your letters about in my pockets and read them at odd
intervals in all kinds of places that you can't imagine.
Cheer up and remember that I'm quite happy. I wish you could be with me
for just one day to understand.
Yours,
CON.