It's night now. I'm sitting in my shirt-sleeves, writing by the light of a candle in an empty bottle. A row is going on outside as of “armed men falling downstairs,” to borrow Stevenson's phrase. It's really more like a dozen celestial cats with kettles tied to their tails. I wonder what God thinks of it all; of all the kings, He alone is silent and takes no sides, notwithstanding the Kaiser's “Me und Gott.”
My jolly little major has just looked up to suggest that the war won't be ended until all the world is under arms. He's an optimist.
LXII
France July 18, 1918
I'm up forward, sitting on a bank, looking at the Hun country through a hedge. I know you'd give anything to be with me. In front there's a big curtain of sea-grey sky, against which planes crawl like flies. A beautiful half-moon looks down at me with the tragic face of Harlequin. Far away across a plain furrowed by shell-fire the spires and domes of cities in the captured territory shine. Like all forbidden lands, there are times when the Hun country looks exquisitely and unreally beautiful, as though it were tempting us to cross the line.
I've just left off to watch a squadron of enemy planes which have been attempting to get across to our side. Everything has opened up on them; machine guns are spouting their luminous trails of tracer bullets; archies are bursting little cotton-wool clouds of death between them and their desire. They evidently belong to a circus, for they're slipping and tumbling and looping like great gulls to whom the air is native. Ah, now they've given it up and are going home thwarted. I wonder what the poor old moon thinks of all these antics and turmoils in the domain which has been hers absolutely for so many æons of nights.
The horrible and the beautiful blending in an ecstasy, that is what war is to-day. All one's senses are unnaturally sharpened for the appreciation of both happiness and pain. You walk down a road where a shell fell a minute ago; the question always in your mind is, “Why wasn't I there?” You shrug your shoulders and smile, “I may be there next time”—and bend all your energies towards being merry to-day. The threat of the end is very provocative of intensity.
It's nearly dark now and I'm writing by the moonlight. One might imagine that the angels were having pillow-fights in their bedrooms by the row that's going on in the sky. And there was a time when the occasional trolley beneath my windows used to keep me awake at night!
5 a.m. The letters came last night. You may imagine the place in which I read them—lying on a kind of coffin-shelf in a Hun dug-out with the usual buzzing of battened flies and the usual smell and snoring of an unwashed B.C. party. How good it is to receive letters; they're the only future we have. After I'd sent the runner down to the battery I had to go forward to a Gomorrha of fallen roofs, which stands almost on the edge of No Man's Land. Stagnant shell-holes, rank weeds, the silence of death, lay all about me, and along the horizon the Hun flares and rockets danced an impish jig of joy. When the war is ended we shall miss these nights. Strange as it sounds, we shall look back on them with wistfulness and regret. Our souls will never again bristle with the same panic of terror and daring. We shall become calm fellows, filling out our waistcoats to a contented rotundity; no one will believe that we were once the first fighting troops of the European cock-pit. We shall argue then, where to-day we strike. We shall have to preach to make men good, whereas to-day we club vice into stupor. We shall miss these nights.
I glance up from my page and gaze out through the narrow slit from which I observe. I see the dear scarlet poppies shining dewy amid the yellow dandelions and wild ox-eyed daisies. I am very happy this morning. The world seems a good place. For the moment I have even given over detesting the Hun. With luck, I tell myself, I shall sit in old gardens again and read the old volumes, and laugh with the same dear people that I used to love. With luck—but when?