Those distant guns again to-night....
Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when they go over the top?
I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, "What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it." But that won't do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.
Summer.... Can it be summer through whose hot air the guns shake and tremble? The honeysuckle, whose little stalks twinkled and shone that January night, has broken at each woody end into its crumbled flower.
Where is the frost, the snow?... Where are the dead?
Where is my trouble and my longing, and the other troubles, and the happiness in other summers?
Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water.
We talk of tablets to the dead. There can be none but in the heart, and the heart fades.
There are only ten men left in bed in the ward. Sometimes I think, "Will there never be another convoy?"
And then: "Is not one man alone sufficient matter on which to reflect?" "One can find God in a herring's head...." says a Japanese proverb.