September 19th, 1916.
DEAREST FATHER:
I'm writing you your birthday letter early, as I don't know how busy
I may be in the next week, nor how long this may take to reach you.
You know how much love I send you and how I would like to be with you.
D'you remember the birthday three years ago when we set the victrola
going outside your room door? Those were my high-jinks days when very
many things seemed possible. I'd rather be the person I am now than the
person I was then. Life was selfish though glorious.
Well, I've seen my first modern battlefield and am quite disillusioned
about the splendor of war. The splendor is all in the souls of the men
who creep through the squalor like vermin--it's in nothing external.
There was a chap here the other day who deserved the V. C. four times
over by running back through the Hun shell fire to bring news that the
infantry wanted more artillery support. I was observing for my brigade
in the forward station at the time. How he managed to live through the
ordeal nobody knows. But men laugh while they do these things. It's
fine.
A modern battlefield is the abomination of abominations. Imagine a
vast stretch of dead country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had
been mutilated with smallpox. There's not a leaf or a blade of grass
in sight. Every house has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird
sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is at night--the scurry
of rats. You enter a kind of ditch, called a trench; it leads on to
another and another in an unjoyful maze. From the sides feet stick
out, and arms and faces--the dead of previous encounters. "One of our
chaps," you say casually, recognizing him by his boots or khaki, or
"Poor blighter--a Hun!" One can afford to forget enmity in the presence
of the dead. It is horribly difficult sometimes to distinguish between
the living and the slaughtered--they both lie so silently in their
little kennels in the earthen bank. You push on--especially if you
are doing observation work, till you are past your own front line and
out in No Man's Land. You have to crouch and move warily now. Zing! A
bullet from a German sniper. You laugh and whisper, "A near one, that."
My first trip to the trenches was up to No Man's Land. I went in the
early dawn and came to a Madame Tussaud's show of the dead, frozen
into immobility in the most extraordinary attitudes. Some of them were
part way out of the ground, one hand pressed to the wound, the other
pointing, the head sunken and the hair plastered over the forehead
by repeated rains. I kept on wondering what my companions would look
like had they been three weeks dead. My imagination became ingeniously
and vividly morbid. When I had to step over them to pass, it seemed
as though they must clutch at my trench coat and ask me to help. Poor
lonely people, so brave and so anonymous in their death! Somewhere
there is a woman who loved each one of them and would give her life for
my opportunity to touch the poor clay that had been kind to her. It's
like walking through the day of resurrection to visit No Man's Land.
Then the Huns see you and the shrapnel begins to fall--you crouch like
a dog and run for it.
One gets used to shell-fire up to a point, but there's not a man who
doesn't want to duck when he hears one coming. The worst of all is the
whizz-bang, because it doesn't give you a chance--it pounces and is on
you the same moment that it bangs. There's so much I wish that I could
tell you. I can only say this, at the moment we're making history.
What a curious birthday letter! I think of all your other
birthdays--the ones before I met these silent men with the green and
yellow faces, and the blackened lips which will never speak again.
What happy times we have had as a family--what happy jaunts when you
took me in those early days, dressed in a sailor suit, when you went
hunting pictures. Yet, for all the damnability of what I now witness,
I was never quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an imperative
self-denial brings a peace which self-seeking never brought.
So don't let this birthday be less gay for my absence. It ought to be
the proudest in your life--proud because your example has taught each
of your sons to do the difficult things which seem right. It would have
been a condemnation of you if any one of us had been a shirker.
"I want to buy fine things for you
And be a soldier if I can."
The lines come back to me now. You read them to me first in the dark
little study from a green oblong book. You little thought that I would
be a soldier--even now I can hardly realize the fact. It seems a dream
from which I shall wake up. Am I really killing men day by day? Am I
really in jeopardy myself?
Whatever happens I'm not afraid, and I'll give you reason to be glad of
me.
Very much love,
CON.