More than anything else the gramophone makes me remember the old days and the old aims and desires. It's the greatest miracle of the century that Caruso and Harry Lauder and George Robey, with all the best of music and laughter-makers, can step into our dug-out from the point of a needle. When we move, whatever else is left behind, the gramophone always goes. It travels in G.S. wagons, on the foot-board of limbers—in all sorts of ways. We're feeling sentimental; we crank up the canned music. Above the roar of the guns we hear, “All that I want is someone to love me, and to love me well.” We're feeling merry, so we dance to “Arizona.” All the world of forgotten pleasures can come to us through that needle-point. And I—whenever it starts—I see home pictures——
Then in an extraordinarily poignant way I feel earnest to have lived, loved, done something big before I die. Everything already done seems insignificant and worthless. It's the feeling which you once called “divine discontent.”
It's evening, as it always is when I write to you. Next door a little refugee child is chanting his prayers under the direction of his father. One can hear the humming of planes overhead. A funny world! How persistent the religious instinct is, that men should still credit God when their hearts are bankrupt!
Good-night, I'm going to bed now.
LII
France June 12, 1918
With me it's 6.30 in the evening. I'm sitting in a farmhouse overlooking the usual French farmyard. The chickens fly in at the window—also the cats. The window is my own mode of entrance; I feel like a burglar when I enter my “bedroom” in this fashion after midnight. Two other officers share the floor with me—literally the floor, for we use our sleeping-sacks.
There's a little boy about three, with long hair, so that at first we mistook him for a girl, who has become the temporary mascot of the battery. He carries the broken remains of a toy rifle and falls in with the men on parades, holding one of the fellows' hands. He's picked up the detail for “'Shun!” and “Stand at Ease!” and carries out the orders as smartly as anyone, looking terrifically serious about it. The men call him “little sister” on account of his appearance, and make him a great pet. I left him sobbing his heart out to-day when I had to leave him behind after he had fallen in with a squad of riflemen.
There's a genuine little girl who is our friend, of whom I am even fonder. She's a refugee kiddy of about thirteen—slim and pretty as a fairy, with a long corn-gold plait of hair down her back.
As soon as we start the gramophone going she peeps noiselessly as a spirit through the window; then one of us lifts her across the sill and she sits on our knees with her face hidden shyly against our shoulders.