Watched a mine go up this evening—great yellow-brown mass of smoke, followed by a beautiful under-cloud of orange-pink that steamed up in a soft creamy way. No firing and shelling followed as at Givenchy....
Take over from ‘A’ to-morrow morning.
10 p.m. Great starlight. Jupiter and Venus both up, and the Great Bear and Orion glittering hard and clean in the steely sky. I wish I had a Homer. I am sure he has just one perfect epithet for Orion on a night like this. I shall read Homer in a new light after these times. I begin to understand the spirit of the Homeric heroes; it was all words, words, words before. Now I see. Billet life—where is that in the Iliad? In the tents, of course. And the eating and drinking, the ‘word that puts heart into men,’ the cool stolid facing of death, all those gruesome details of wounds and weapons, all is being enacted here every day exactly as in the Homeric age. Human nature has not altered.
And did not Homer tell, too, how utterly ‘fed up’ they were with it all? Can one not read between the lines and see, besides the glamour of physical courage, the strain, the weariness, the ‘fed-upness’ of them all! I think so. ‘Νόστος’ is a word I remember so well. They were all longing for the day of their return. As here, the big fights were few and far between; and as here, there were the months and years of waiting.
And on them, too, the stars looked down, winking alike at Greeks and Trojans; just as to-night thousands of German and British faces, dull-witted or sharp, sour-faced or smiling, sad or happy, are gazing up and wondering if there is any wisdom in the world yet.
Four thousand years ago? And all the time the stars in the Great Bear have been hurtling apart at thousands of miles an hour, and the human eye sees no difference. No wonder they wink at us....
And our mothers, and wives ... the women-folk—Euripides understood their views on war. Ten years they waited....
Must go to bed. D—— these scuffling rats.”