back, life will be a much less restless affair.

This letter! I can imagine it being delivered and the shout from whoever
takes it and the comments. I make the contrast in my mind--this little
lean-to spread of canvas about four feet high, the horse-lines, guns,
sentries going up and down--and then the dear home and the well-loved
faces.

Good-bye. Don't be at all nervous.
Yours lovingly,
Con.



X


September 12th, Tuesday.

DEAREST M.:

You will already have received my first letters giving you my address
over here. The wagon has just come up to our position, but it has
brought me only one letter since I've been across. I'm sitting in my
dug-out with shells passing over my head with the sound of ripping
linen. I've already had the novel experience of firing a battery, and
to-morrow I go up to the first line trenches.

It's extraordinary how commonplace war becomes to a man who is thrust
among others who consider it commonplace. Not fifty yards away from me a