I don't think any of us realize quite how much war has changed us, particularly in our relations to sex. Women had grown discontented with being wives and mothers, and had proved that in many departments they could compete with men. This competition was responsible for a growing disrespect. Men were beginning to treat women in a way they demanded—as though they were men. Women were beginning to regard men with a quiet sex-contempt. It looked as if chivalry and all that made for knighthood were at an end. Then came war, calling men to a sacrifice in which women had no share—could not share because they were physically incapable of fighting—and women to the only contribution they could make, mercy and motherhood. We've been flung back on our primal differences and virtues. War has cut the knotted sex-emancipation; we stand up to-day as elementally male and female as when the Garden of Eden was depopulated. Amongst our fighting-men, women actually hold the place which was allotted to them by idealists in troubadour times.
Mothers and sisters and sweethearts, remembered at this distance, have made all women sacred. A new medievalism and asceticism have sprung out of our modern tragedy, enacted beneath the sea, on the land and in the clouds. The tragedy, while modern to us, is actually the oldest in the world—merely death.
It's evening now. No letter from home came this afternoon.
LVII
France July 4, 1918
I am now attached with two guns to the infantry on a special job. I live with the battalion—speak about “our battalion,” in fact—and share quarters with the Trench Mortar officer. The country is green and fragrant with dog-roses. The dead have been gathered up and lie in little scattered graveyards. Our living men spread their blankets between the mounds and at night hang their equipment on the crosses. War robs men of all fear of the supernatural—or is it that the dead have become our brothers?
One writes a description of battlefields to-day and it is untrue to-morrow. Everything has changed in the past year. Siege warfare, with deep trenches and guns in positions of observation, is becoming more rare; we are more mobile now and see more of the country. I believe, before many months are out, the dream of every gunner along the Western Front will have come true, and we shall be firing at the enemy over open sights and coming into action on the gallop. It will be far more sporting and exciting. The Trench Mortar officer with whom I am living remembers that kind of work in the early days, when my battery was still firing on the enemy while the Hun was bayoneting the batteries behind. He has a great tale of how he came right through the enemy without knowing, bringing up with him a precious load of small-arms ammunition to his General, who was cut off by the enemy. He and his five men were given rifles, and together with the waifs and strays of many broken regiments held the line against the advance on Calais. Experiences such as that are worth living for; I'm hopeful that before I take off khaki I may be in something of the kind.
You needn't think of me any more—at least for the present—as living in beastliness and corruption. I daresay the country where I am is almost as beautiful as where you are spending your holidays. The Hun did the Allies a good turn when he advanced, for he shoved us back out of the filth of three years' fighting into cleanness. One can see deserted cottages with their gardens full of flowers, and green woods shaking their plumes against blue skies. At one of our halts the men did themselves very well with baskets of trout; they caught the trout by the simple expedient of flinging bombs into the river. The concussion killed the fish and they floated to the surface.
For the present that is all my news.