You're glad, and yet at close quarters only in hot blood would you hurt
a man.

I'd been back for a little over an hour when I had to go forward again
to guide in some guns. The country was dazzlingly white in the
moonlight. As far as eye could see every yard was an old battlefield;
beneath the soft white fleece of snow lay countless unburied bodies.
Like frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the horizon, Hun
lights were shooting up and drifting across our front. Tap-tap-tappity
went the machine-guns; whoo-oo went the heavies, and they always stamp
like angry bulls. I had to come back by myself across the heroic
corruption which the snow had covered. All the way I asked myself why
was I not frightened. What has happened to me? Ghosts should walk here
if anywhere. Moreover, I know that I shall be frightened again when the
war is ended. Do you remember how you once offered me money to walk
through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I wouldn't? I wouldn't if
you offered it to me now. You remember Meredith's lines in "The Woods of
Westermain":

     "All the eyeballs under hoods
     Shroud you in their glare;
     Enter these enchanted woods
     You who dare."

Maybe what re-creates one for the moment is the British officer's
uniform, and even more the fact that you are not asked, but expected, to
do your duty. So I came back quite unruffled across battered trenches
and silent mounds to write this letter to you.

My dear father, I'm over thirty, and yet just as much a little boy as
ever. I still feel overwhelmingly dependent on your good opinion and
love. I'm glad that they are black days when you have no letters from
me. I love to think of the rush to the door when the postman rings and
the excited shouting up the stairs, "Quick, one from Con."

February 2nd.

You see by the writing how tired I was when I reached this point. It's
nearly twenty-four hours later and again night. The gramophone is
playing an air from _La Tosca_ to which the guns beat out a bass
accompaniment. I close my eyes and picture the many times I have heard
the (probably) German orchestras of Broadway Joy Palaces play that same
music. How incongruous that I should be listening to it here and under
these circumstances! It must have been listened to so often by gay
crowds in the beauty places of the world. A romantic picture grows up in
my mind of a blue night, the laughter of youth in evening dress, lamps
twinkling through trees, far off the velvety shadow of water and
mountains, and as a voice to it all, that air from _La Tosca_. I can
believe that the silent people near by raise themselves up in their
snow-beds to listen, each one recalling some ecstatic moment before the
dream of life was shattered.

There's a picture in the Pantheon at Paris, I remember; I believe it's
called _To Glory_. One sees all the armies of the ages charging out of
the middle distance with Death riding at their head. The only glory that
I have discovered in this war is in men's hearts--it's not external.
Were one to paint the spirit of this war he would depict a mud
landscape, blasted trees, an iron sky; wading through the slush and
shell-holes would come a file of bowed figures, more like outcasts from
the Embankment than soldiers. They're loaded down like pack animals,
their shoulders are rounded, they're wearied to death, but they go on
and go on. There's no "To Glory" about what we're doing out here;
there's no flash of swords or splendour of uniforms. There are only very
tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men who
could never again pass an insurance test, a mob of broken
counter-jumpers, ragged ex-plumbers and quite unheroic persons. We're
civilians in khaki, but because of the ideals for which we fight we've
managed to acquire soldiers' hearts.

My flow of thought was interrupted by a burst of song in which I was
compelled to join. We're all writing letters around one candle; suddenly
the O.C. looked up and began, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. We
sang it in parts. It was in Southport, when I was about nine years old,
that I first heard that sung. You had gone for your first trip to
America, leaving a very lonely family behind you. We children were
scared to death that you'd be drowned. One evening, coming back from a
walk on the sand-hills, we heard voices singing in a garden, God Be With
You Till We Meet Again. The words and the soft dusk, and the vague
figures in the English summer garden, seemed to typify the terror of all
partings. We've said good-bye so often since, and God has been with us.
I don't think any parting was more hard than our last at the prosaic
dock-gates with the cold wind of duty blowing, and the sentry barring
your entrance, and your path leading back to America while mine led on
to France. But you three were regular soldiers--just as much soldiers as
we chaps who were embarking. One talks of our armies in the field, but
there are the other armies, millions strong, of mothers and fathers and
sisters, who keep their eyes dry, treasure muddy letters beneath their
pillows, offer up prayers and wait, wait, wait so eternally for God to
open another door.

To-morrow I again go forward, which means rising early and taking a long
plod through the snows; that's one reason for not writing any more, and
another is that our one poor candle is literally on its last legs.

Your poem, written years ago when the poor were marching in London, is
often in my mind:

     "Yesterday and to-day
       Have been heavy with labour and sorrow;
     I should faint if I did not see
       The day that is after to-morrow."

And there's that last verse which prophesied utterly the spirit in which
we men at the Front are fighting to-day:

     "And for me, with spirit elate
       The mire and the fog I press thorough,
     For Heaven shines under the cloud
       Of the day that is after to-morrow."

We civilians who have been taught so long to love our enemies and do
good to them who hate us--much too long ever to make professional
soldiers--are watching with our hearts in our eyes for that day which
conies after to-morrow. Meanwhile we plod on determinedly, hoping for
the hidden glory.

                    Yours very lovingly,
                                           Con.

XLV

February 3rd, 1917.

Dear Misses W.:

You were very kind to remember me at Christmas. _Seventeen_ was read
with all kinds of gusto by all my brother officers. It's still being
borrowed.

I've been back from leave a few days now and am settling back to
business again. It was a trifle hard after over-eating and undersleeping
myself for nine days, and riding everywhere with my feet up in taxis. I
was the wildest little boy. Here it's snowy and bitter. We wear scarves
round our ears to keep the frost away and dream of fires a mile high.
All I ask, when the war is ended, is to be allowed to sit asleep in a
big armchair and to be left there absolutely quiet. Sleep, which we
crave so much at times, is only death done up in sample bottles. Perhaps
some of these very weary men who strew our battlefields are glad to lie
at last at endless leisure.

Good-bye, and thank you.

               Yours very sincerely,
                                       Con.

XLVI

February 4th, 1917.

My Dearest Mother:

Somewhere in the distance I can hear a piano going and men's voices
singing A Perfect Day. It's queer how music creates a world for you in
which you are not, and makes you dreamy. I've been sitting by a fire and
thinking of all the happy times when the total of desire seemed almost
within one's grasp. It never is--one always, always misses it and has to
rub the dust from the eyes, recover one's breath and set out on the
search afresh. I suppose when you grow very old you learn the lesson of
sitting quiet, and the heart stops beating and the total of desire comes
to you. And yet I can remember so many happy days, when I was a child in
the summer and later at Kootenay. One almost thought he had caught the
secret of carrying heaven in his heart.

By the time this reaches you I'll be in the line again, but for the
present I'm undergoing a special course of training. You can't hear the
most distant sound of guns, and if it wasn't for the pressure of study,
similar to that at _Kingston_, one would be very rested.

Sunday of all days is the one when I remember you most. You're just
sitting down to mid-day dinner,--I've made the calculation for
difference of time. You're probably saying how less than a month ago we
were in London. That doesn't sound true even when I write it. I wonder
how your old familiar surroundings strike you. It's terrible to come
down from the mountain heights of a great elation like our ten days in
London. I often think of that with regard to myself when the war is
ended. There'll be a sense of dissatisfaction when the old lost comforts
are regained. There'll be a sense of lowered manhood. The stupendous
terrors of Armageddon demand less courage than the uneventful terror of
the daily commonplace. There's something splendid and exhilarating in
going forward among bursting shells--we, who have done all that, know
that when the guns have ceased to roar our blood will grow more
sluggish and we'll never be such men again. Instead of getting up in the
morning and hearing your O.C. say, "You'll run a line into trench
so-and-so to-day and shoot up such-and-such Hun wire," you'll hear
necessity saying, "You'll work from breakfast to dinner and earn your
daily bread. And you'll do it to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
world without end. Amen." They never put that forever and forever part
into their commands out here, because the Amen for any one of us may be
only a few hours away. But the big immediate thing is so much easier to
do than the prosaic carrying on without anxiety--which is your game. I
begin to understand what you have had to suffer now that R. and E. are
really at war too. I get awfully anxious about them. I never knew before
that either of them owned so much of my heart. I get furious when I
remember that they might get hurt. I've heard of a Canadian who joined
when he learnt that his best friend had been murdered by Hun bayonets.
He came to get his own back and was the most reckless man in his
battalion. I can understand his temper now. We're all of us in danger of
slipping back into the worship of Thor.

I'll write as often as I can while here, but I don't get much time--so
you'll understand. It's the long nights when one sits up to take the
firing in action that give one the chance to be a decent correspondent.

My birthday comes round soon, doesn't it? Good heavens, how ancient I'm
getting and without any "grow old along with me" consolation. Well, to
grow old is all in the job of living.

Good-bye, and God bless you all.

                              Yours ever,
                                               Con.

XLVII

February 4th, 1917.

Dear Mr. B.:

I have been intending to write to you for a very long time, but as most
of one's writing is done when one ought to be asleep, and sleep next to
eating is one of our few remaining pleasures, my intended letter has
remained in my head up to now. On returning from a nine days' leave to
London the other day, however, I found two letters from you awaiting me
and was reproached into effort.

War's a queer game--not at all what one's civilian mind imagined; it's
far more horrible and less exciting. The horrors which the civilian mind
dreads most are mutilation and death. Out here we rarely think about
them; the thing which wears on one most and calls out his gravest
courage is the endless sequence of physical discomfort. Not to be able
to wash, not to be able to sleep, to have to be wet and cold for long
periods at a stretch, to find mud on your person, in your food, to have
to stand in mud, see mud, sleep in mud and to continue to smile--that's
what tests courage. Our chaps are splendid. They're not the hair-brained
idiots that some war-correspondents depict from day to day. They're
perfectly sane people who know to a fraction what they're up against,
but who carry on with a grim good-nature and a determination to win with
a smile. I never before appreciated as I do to-day the latent capacity
for big-hearted endurance that is in the heart of every man. Here are
apparently quite ordinary chaps--chaps who washed, liked theatres, loved
kiddies and sweethearts, had a zest for life--they're bankrupt of all
pleasures except the supreme pleasure of knowing that they're doing the
ordinary and finest thing of which they are capable. There are millions
to whom the mere consciousness of doing their duty has brought an
heretofore unexperienced peace of mind. For myself I was never happier
than I am at present; there's a novel zip added to life by the daily
risks and the knowledge that at last you're doing something into which
no trace of selfishness enters. One can only die once; the chief concern
that matters is _how_ and not _when_ you die. I don't pity the weary men
who have attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our
shell-furrowed battles; they "went West" in their supreme moment. The
men I pity are those who could not hear the call of duty and whose
consciences will grow more flabby every day. With the brutal roar of the
first Prussian gun the cry came to the civilised world, "Follow thou
me," just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went to their Calvary
singing Tipperary, rubbish, rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal
to that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphitheatre. "Greater love
hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." Our
chaps are doing that consciously, willingly, almost without bitterness
towards their enemies; for the rest it doesn't matter whether they sing
hymns or ragtime. They've followed their ideal--freedom--and died for
it. A former age expressed itself in Gregorian chants; ours, no less
sincerely, disguises its feelings in ragtime.

Since September I have been less than a month out of action. The game
doesn't pall as time goes on--it fascinates. We've got to win so that
men may never again be tortured by the ingenious inquisition of modern
warfare. The winning of the war becomes a personal affair to the chaps
who are fighting. The world which sits behind the lines, buys extra
specials of the daily papers and eats three square meals a day, will
never know what this other world has endured for its safety, for no man
of this other world will have the vocabulary in which to tell. But don't
for a moment mistake me--we're grimly happy.

What a serial I'll write for you if I emerge from this turmoil! Thank
God, my outlook is all altered. I don't want to live any longer--only to
live well.

Good-bye and good luck.

                 Yours,
                    Coningsby Dawson.

XLVIII

February 5th, 1917.

My Dearest Mother:

Aren't the papers good reading now-a-days with nothing to record but
success? It gives us hope that at last, anyway before the year is out,
the war must end. As you know, I am at the artillery school back of the
lines for a month, taking an extra course. I have been meeting a great
many young officers from all over the world and have listened to them
discussing their program for when peace is declared. Very few of them
have any plans or prospects. Most of them had just started on some
course of professional training to which they won't have the energy to
go back after a two years' interruption. The question one asks is how
will all these men be reabsorbed into civilian life. I'm afraid the
result will be a vast host of men with promising pasts and highly
uncertain futures. We shall be a holiday world without an income. I'm
afraid the hero-worship attitude will soon change to impatience when the
soldiers beat their swords into ploughshares and then confess that they
have never been taught to plough. That's where I shall score--by beating
my sword into a pen. But what to write about--! Everything will seem so
little and inconsequential after seeing armies marching to mud and
death, and people will soon get tired of hearing about that. It seems as
though war does to the individual what it does to the landscapes it
attacks--obliterates everything personal and characteristic. A valley,
when a battle has done with it, is nothing but earth--exactly what it
was when God said, "Let there be Light;" a man just something with a
mind purged of the past and ready to observe afresh. I question whether
a return to old environments will ever restore to us the whole of our
old tastes and affections. War is, I think, utterly destructive. It
doesn't even create courage--it only finds it in the soul of a man. And
yet there is one quality which will survive the war and help us to face
the temptations of peace--that same courage which most of us have
unconsciously discovered out here.

Well, my dear, I have little news--at least, none that I can tell. I'm
just about recovered from an attack of "flu." I want to get thoroughly
rid of it before I go back to my battery. I hope you all keep well. God
bless you all.

                    Yours ever,
                                    Con.

XLIX

February 6th, 1917.

My Very Dear M.:

I read in to-day's paper that U.S.A. threatens to come over and help us.
I wish she would. The very thought of the possibility fills me with joy.
I've been light-headed all day. It would be so ripping to live among
people, when the war is ended, of whom you need not be ashamed.
Somewhere deep down in my heart I've felt a sadness ever since I've been
out here, at America's lack of gallantry--it's so easy to find excuses
for not climbing to Calvary; sacrifice was always too noble to be
sensible. I would like to see the country of our adoption become
splendidly irrational even at this eleventh hour in the game; it would
redeem her in the world's eyes. She doesn't know what she's losing. From
these carcase-strewn fields of khaki there's a cleansing wind blowing
for the nations that have died. Though there was only one Englishman
left to carry on the race when this war is victoriously ended, I would
give more for the future of England than for the future of America with
her ninety millions whose sluggish blood was not stirred by the call of
duty. It's bigness of soul that makes nations great and not population.
Money, comfort, limousines and ragtime are not the requisites of men
when heroes are dying. I hate the thought of Fifth Avenue, with its
pretty faces, its fashions, its smiling frivolity. America as a great
nation will die, as all coward civilisations have died, unless she
accepts the stigmata of sacrifice, which a divine opportunity again
offers her.

If it were but possible to show those ninety millions one battlefield
with its sprawling dead, its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self,
I think then--no, they wouldn't be afraid. Fear isn't the emotion one
feels--they would experience the shame of living when so many have shed
their youth freely. This war is a prolonged moment of exultation for
most of us--we are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes. To lay down
one's life for one's friend once seemed impossible. All that is altered.
We lay down our lives that the future generations may be good and kind,
and so we can contemplate oblivion with quiet eyes. Nothing that is
noblest that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the simplest men out
here to-day. They may die childless, but their example will father the
imagination of all the coming ages. These men, in the noble indignation
of a great ideal, face a worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics
ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown
to atoms, gassed, tortured. And again other men step forward to take
their places well knowing what will be their fate. Bodies may die, but
the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its
way. The battened souls of America will die and be buried. I believe the
decision of the next few days will prove to be the crisis in America's
nationhood. If she refuses the pain which will save her, the cancer of
self-despising will rob her of her life.

This feeling is strong with us. It's past midnight, but I could write
of nothing else to-night.

God bless you.

                    Yours ever,
                                    Con.