wars could only see the abysmal result of their handiwork! Give them one
day in the trenches under shell-fire when their lives aren't worth a
five minutes' purchase--or one day carrying back the wounded through
this tortured country, or one day in a Red Cross train. No one can
imagine the damnable waste and Christlessness of this battering of
human flesh. The only way that this War can be made holy is by making it
so thorough that war will be finished for all time.

Papa at least will be awake by now. How familiar the old house seems to
me--I can think of the place of every picture. Do you set the victrola
going now-a-days? I bet you play Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue.

Please send me anything in the way of eatables that the goodness of your
hearts can imagine--also smokes.

Later.

I came back from the front-line all right and have since been hard at it
firing. Your letters reached me in the midst of a bombardment--I read
them in a kind of London fog of gun-powder smoke, with my steel helmet
tilted back, in the interval of commanding my section through a
megaphone.

Don't suppose that I'm in any way unhappy--I'm as cheerful as a cricket
and do twice as much hopping--I have to. There's something
extraordinarily bracing about taking risks and getting away with
it--especially when you know that you're contributing your share to a
far-reaching result. My mother is the mother of a soldier now, and
soldiers' mothers don't lie awake at night imagining--they just say a
prayer for their sons and leave everything in God's hands. I'm sure