‘I was glad to get your letter. I have wondered how the War took you. I am glad that you have stayed sane, and that you prefer your baby to the world. That is as it ought to be after all.
‘We have most of us lost our heads, and what will come of it all I don’t know. I feel a fraud drilling my wretched platoon, inspecting their kit, seeing if they have tooth-brushes, that they have polished their buttons, and mine too. I wonder what it is all for, what it will all lead to. We say “for King and Country”; we tell the poor beggars that, and they are as keen as mustard, most of them, like children playing at a game; only it is more than that, for they feel elated somehow, and raised out of themselves, at least some of them do—I did at first too, thought about being killed, and felt heroic. I don’t now; danger seems very remote and discomfort very present, and I can’t believe we shall ever get beyond this.
‘It is muddy here; all mud and flat dull fields, and when it rains, as it did last week, the wet comes through the roof, and we are uncomfortable and cross. It is an odd life. I don’t know what to talk about; the Colonel is a regular, and so is one Lieutenant; all the other officers are either recruits like me or Territorial Reserve. They seem keen about everything, and the battalion in particular, and they are most of them pleasant fellows enough, but they make one feel a fool, and I don’t like the way they talk; their values are so odd.
‘Guy is enjoying himself on Salisbury Plain. I haven’t heard from George lately.’
I could picture Hugo better after reading it. He was still alone, detached, half way between my attitude and Guy’s. I felt sorry for him in his wet tent, inspecting tooth-brushes.
IX
Mrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’; ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts and bandages and socks.
She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.
I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a help to me at all to say more than that.
‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic to say anything like that.