"My dear Bystander,
"I wish you wouldn't apologise all over the outside of my parcels for what is inside them. Why put 'Only six buns and two dried haddocks'? Or: 'Merely a little dill water'? Can't you put 'Provisions' only? Won't that satisfy the regulations?"
The sending out of his silver identity disc and chain was an agonising experience. On the face of it there is nothing very tragic about a flat bit of silver with a man's name and regiment engraved on it. But what it stands for! Oh, heaven, what it stands for!
I knew what it stood for as I looked at it. It stood first and foremost for the fact that the boy who in himself was all earth and all heaven to me was in the army only one among many thousands—perhaps among many hundreds of thousands. It stood for a fearful confusion in which masses of men might get inextricably mixed up so that none could know who his fellow was; and it stood for a field on which there were many dead lying, and for grim figures walking about among those dead and depending for their identifications on some token worn by the still shapes whose lips would speak no more.
All this passed through my mind while I packed up the little disc and chain. I had had to order a very long chain so that it might slip easily over the Boy's big lion-cub head.
"After all, I'm making too much of it," I told myself. "What is the identity disc but a mere convenience? Haven't I hung one of my own cards on to a button of my dress sometimes in Paris, when I was going to drive about alone in their dangerous cabs?"
And I laughed and went to look for something vulgar to put on the gramophone to cheer myself up.
Since he had gone away we had had no music. We had all been too restless to play the piano and any of the ordinary gramophone records would have brought us memories of him too keen for us to bear. But now suddenly I remembered a dozen records hidden away under a sofa because I had judged them on a first trial to be uninteresting. The Boy had known nothing of them, so they would not torture me with thoughts of him.
With some difficulty I pulled out the uppermost one of the dozen, dusted it and put it on the gramophone.
It was Henschel's "Morning Hymn," sung by Gervase Elwes.