France May 3, 1918
It's early morning. I'm still sitting in the little dug-out with the slit that looks towards the Hun Front line. Everything but the immediate foreground is blanketed in heavy mist at present. I can hear bombing going on somewhere—but I can also hear a lark singing near to the sun, high overhead. The clumps of dandelions are still sleeping. They haven't opened—they're green instead of yellow. The grass sparkles with little drops of dew, more beautiful than the most costly diamonds. With the first of the dawn I read a story by Tolstoy; since then I've been sitting thinking—thinking of you and of the sleeping house in Newark, which will soon be disturbed by your bath-water running, if you still rise early; and thinking how strange it is that I should be here in the greatest war in history. We planned to do such different things with our lives. My first dream was to become extremely wise. At Oxford there seemed no limit to the amount of knowledge I could acquire; it seemed only a matter of patience and perseverance. Then that dream went, and I wanted to save the world. I'm afraid one has to be a little aristocratic towards the world before he can conceive of himself as capable of saving it or of the world as requiring saving. The aristocratic touch grew on me and I decided to do my saving not by touching people, but by writing poetry for the few who would understand. It wasn't half such good poetry as I thought it was at the time, and it never could have re-made anything. Disappointed in that and because I had now committed myself to a literary way of life, I took to writing novels, which nobody wanted to publish, read, or buy. Then, because I had to live somehow, I entered into the commercial end of publishing. There was always the shadow of a dream which I pursued even then in my spare hours; it was the dream that saved me and led me on to write The Garden Without Walls. But the shadow was growing fainter when this war commenced. And here I am, human at last, all touch of false aristocracy gone, peeping out across the grass wet with the dew of May, beneath which lie the common clay heroes who have died for democracy. How noiselessly these men gave up their lives and with how little consciousness of self-appreciation. They rather put us to shame—we privileged dawdlers in our haunted minds. They recognized the one straight thing to do when the opportunity presented itself; they did it swiftly and unreasoningly with their might. They didn't write about what they did; for them the doing was sufficient. I think I shall always be a humble man after such companionship, if I survive. I see life in courageous vistas of actions now; formerly I was like Hamlet—I thought myself into a green sickness. Marriage and children, a home and family love are the best that anyone can extract from life. There have been years when I didn't like my kind.
Out of the many things that have come to me in the past six months I am particularly glad of little Tinker's friendship—P.'. baby. She's not two yet, but we were real pals. She would never go to sleep until I had kissed her in her cot “Good-night.” First thing in the morning she would be beside my bed, tugging at the clothes and ordering me to “Det up.” Since I've been gone they've had to ring the bell and pretend that I'm just entering the hall, so that they may make her go to sleep contented. When they ask her, “Where's Con?” she reaches up to the window and points. “Dorn walk in park,” she says. They talk about the love of a woman keeping a man straight, but I don't think it's to be compared with the love of a little child. You can't lie to them.
The sharp rat-a-tat of the machine guns has started; but the mist is too thick for me to see what is happening——It's nothing; it's died down.
In an hour I shall be relieved, and shall return to the guns and post this letter. It will reach you when? Sometime in June, I expect, when the summer is really come and you're wearing your cool dresses. I can see you going out in the early morning to do your shopping.
XLIV
France May 7, 1918
I am sitting in my bed—my sleeping-sack, I mean—which is spread out on the red-tiled floor of a funny little cottage. There isn't much of the floor left, as four of the other officers are sharing the room with me. Coming in through the window is the smell of sweet myrtle, old-fashioned and quiet; from far away drifts in the continual pounding of the guns and, strangely muddled up with the gunfire, the multitudinous croaking of frogs. I'm having an extraordinary May month of it in lovely country, marching through the showers, getting drenched and drying when the sun deigns to make an appearance. After being off a horse for so long, I'm in the saddle for many hours every day.
I am glad that you all feel the way you do about my returning to the Front. I was sure you wouldn't want me to be out of these great happenings. My fear, when I was in England this spring, was the same as I had when I first joined—that fighting would all-be ended before I got into the line. No fear of that; I think we're in for another two years of it. There's hot work ahead—the hottest of the entire war. Oddly enough my spirits rise as the struggle promises to grow fiercer. I don't know why, unless it is that as the action quickens one has a chance of giving more. There's nothing sad about being wounded or dying for one's country. In this war one does so much more than that—he dies for the whole of humanity.
Outside my window a stretch of hedges runs down to a little brook. Ducks, geese, cocks and hens make farmyard noises from dawn till last thing at night. Above all the peace and quiet, the distant guns keep up their incessant murmur. What a variety of places are likely to shelter me before the summer is ended—woods, ditches, open fields, trenches. It's all in the game and is romance of a sort. I'm sunburnt and hard. I feel tremendously alive.