XL
France April 26, 1918
I It is now over a week since I have been back with my battery, and it seems as though all that trip along the American line and the rush back to New York had never happened. I'm sitting in a little “house” in a deep chalk trench. The house is made of half-circles of corrugated iron; there's an anti-gas blanket hanging at one end and at the other a window made of oiled calico. Up one corner are the maps, scales, and office papers; pinned on boards is a four-foot map of the entire English front. My sleeping bag is stretched on an old French spring mattress, which was brought here some time ago by the Huns. From the walls hang a higgledy-piggledy of trench coats, breeches, tunics. This is the place in which we work out our ranges, play cards, have our meals, and rest when we're back from doing forward work.
You can walk for miles where we are without ever being seen, if you follow the various systems of Hun and British trenches, for we're plumb in the heart of an old battlefield. The only landmarks left to guide one are the craters as big as churches—records of mines that have been sprung—and little rows of lonely graves. At night when the moon is up, this country creates the curious ghostly illusion of being an endless alkali desert, beaten into billows by the wind. The shells go shrieking over it and wreaths of mist wander here and there like phantoms. Destruction can create a terrible pretence and caricature of beauty. I wish you might visit such a place just once so as to get an idea of where our lives are spent.
Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different. We're having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we're as amused by the Hun as ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him. That is the attitude of every British soldier that I've met. We're as happy and unconcerned as children. There's one chap here who's typical of this spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event. He's the raiding officer of a certain battalion, and is known as “Battling Brown”—though Brown is not his real name. He has a little company of his own, consisting of seventy men. He's been in over a hundred raids on the Hun Front line and has only had two of his men killed in a year. A short while ago he went across with his raiders and captured three Germans; on the return journey across No Man's Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them. He led his men safely back to our lines and then set out again alone on a private excursion into the Boche territory. By dawn he once more returned, bringing back four prisoners single-handed. You might picture such a man as a kind of Hercules, but he isn't. He's thin, and tall, and fair, and high strung. His age, I should guess, is about twenty-two.
Far away in the distance I can hear the pipers playing. It always makes me think of Loch Lomond and when we were little tads. How green and quiet and cool those days seem now—the long rides across the moors and down the glens, the bathing in little mountain streams, the walks in the sad twilights. There are so many happy memories I have to thank you for. You were very wise and generous in the way you planned my childhood. I'm less than a fortnight back at the Front, but I'm already falling into the old habit of happy retrospect. We don't live here really. Our souls are in France only for brief and glorious and intense intervals—during the moments of attack and repulse. The rest of the time we're away in the green valleys of remembered places, watching the ghosts who are the shadows of what we were.
My groom is a boy named Gilpin. The name has proved his downfall. He galloped my horse on the hard road the other day, which is forbidden. A colonel caught him going full tilt, stopped him and took his name. When the severities seemed ended this innocent young party asked the colonel to hold his horse while he mounted—so now he's up on an extra charge of insolence.
Army discipline is in many ways silly and old maidish. Here's a chap who's faithful, well conducted, and honest. He's likely to get a heavier punishment for asking a superior officer to hold his horse than if he'd been drunk and uproarious.
XLI
France April 28, 1918