I've just left hospital and am staying at this hotel. You keep saying in your letters that you never heard how I got my injury. I described it—but that letter must have gone astray. On 26th June I was wounded not by a shell, but by a piece of an iron chimney which was knocked down on to my right arm. I had it sewn up and for two days it was all right. The third I went up for an attack and it started to swell—by the time I came back I had gas-gangrene. The arm is better now and I'm on sick leave, though still working. They've made me an offer of a job here in London, but I should break my heart if I could not go back to the Front. But I think when I've finished here that I may get a special leave, with permission to call in at New York. Wouldn't that be grand?

I don't want to raise your hopes too high, but it seems extremely likely that I shall see you shortly. I was to-day before my medical board, and they gave me two months' home service. I have been promised that as soon as a new Canadian ruling on home leave is confirmed, my application for leave will go through.

If that happens, I shall cable you at once that I am coming. It doesn't seem at all possible or true that this can be so, and I'm making myself no promises till I'm really on the boat. It would be better that you should not, also. I'm taking a gamble and am going to order a new tunic for the occasion this afternoon.

It's a golden afternoon outside—the kind that turns the leaves red at Kootenay, with the tang of iced wine in the air. The sound of London is like the tumming of a thousand banjos. It's good to be alive, and very wonderful after all that has happened.

Note.—Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson arrived at Quebec on 26th September and came home on the following day. He was at home for a month. During that time he spoke in public on several occasions, and wrote the book which was brought out the following spring, entitled “The Glory of the Trenches.”

XIV

Somewhere on the Atlantic November 11, 1917

Here's the first letter since I left New York, coming to you. It's seven in the morning; I'm lying in my bunk, expecting any minute to be called to my bath.

So far it's been a pleasant voyage, with rolling seas and no submarines. There are scarcely a hundred passengers, of whom only four are ladies, in the first class. The men are Government officials, Army and Navy officers going on Cook's Tours, and Naval attachés. The American naval men are an especially fine type. We do all the usual things—play cards, deck-golf and sleep immoderately, but always at the wrong times.

I'm going back for the second time, and going back in the most placid frame of mind. I compare this trip with my first trip over as a soldier. I was awfully anxious then, and kept saying good-bye to things for the last time. Now I live day by day in a manner which is so take-it-for-granted as to be almost commonplace. I've locked my imagination away in some garret of my mind and the house of my thoughts is very quiet.