The mail has just come up to us. The runner stuck his head into the hole in the trench where I live and shoved in a pile of letters. “How many for me?” I asked. “All of them,” he said.
I'm all alone at the battery, the major having gone forward to reconnoitre a position and all the other subalterns being away on duties—so I've had a quiet time browsing through my correspondence. A Hun cat sits at the top of the dug-out across the trench and blinks at me. We found him on the position. He's fat and sleek and plausible-looking. I can't get it out of my mind that he's kept up his strength by battening on the corpses of his former owners. Between the guns there are two graves; one to an unknown British and the other to an unknown German soldier.
The battlefield itself stretches away all billowy with hay for miles and miles. When a puff of wind blows across it, it rustles like fire. The sides of the trenches are gay with poppies and cornflowers. The larks sing industriously overhead, and above them, like the hum of a swarm of bees, pass the fighting planes. Miles to the rear I can hear the strife of bands, playing their battalions up to the fine. A brave, queer, battling world! If one lives to be old, he will talk about these days and persuade himself that he longs to be back, if the time ever comes when life has lost its challenge.
The Hun doesn't seem to be so frisky as he was in March and April. Now that he's quieting down, we begin to lose our hatred and to speak of him more tolerantly again. But whatever may be said in his defence, he's a nasty fellow.
Since I started this letter I've dined, done a lot of work, watched a marvellous sunset, and received orders to push up forward very early in the morning. I shall probably send you a line from the O.P. The mystery of night has settled down. Round the western rim of the horizon there is still a stain of red. Under the dusk, limbers and pack horses crawl along mud trails and sunken roads. We become populous when night has fallen.
LXI
France July 17, 1918
To-night brought a great wad of American papers. What a time America is having—all shouting and anticipation of glory without any suspicion of the cost. War's fine when it's khaki and drums on Fifth Avenue—if it wasn't tortured bodies, broken hearts, and blinded eyes. Where I am the dead lie thick beneath the sod; poppies pour like blood across the landscape, and cornflowers stand tall in sockets empty of eyes. The inscription “Unknown Soldier” is written on many crosses that grow like weeds from the shell-holes. All the feet that marched away with shouting now lie silent; their owners have even lost their names. Could death do more? Where I live at present everything is blasted, stagnant, decayed, morose. War's a fine spectacle for those who only cheer from the pavement.
It isn't that I'm angry with people for seizing life and being gay. We're gay out here—but we've earned the right. Many of us are happier than we ever were in our lives. Why not? For the first time we're quite sure every minute of the day that we're doing right. And that certainty is the only excuse for being happy while the Front line is suffering the tortures of the damned.
I came down this morning from doing forward work; it had been raining in torrents and the trenches were awash. I sleep to-night at the battery and to-morrow I go forward again. It's really great fun forward when it's fine. All day you watch the Hun country for signs of movement and snipe his support-trenches and back-country. Far away on the horizon you watch plumes of smoke trail from the chimneys of his towns, and try to guess his intentions and plans. War's the greatest game of the intellect yet invented; very little of its success to-day is due to brute strength.