My Dearest M.:

Peace after a storm! Your letter was not brought up by the water-wagon
this evening, but by an orderly--the mud prevented wheel-traffic. I was
just sitting down to read it when Fritz began to pay us too much
attention. I put down your letter, grabbed my steel helmet, rushed out
to see where the shells were falling, and then cleared my men to a safer
area. (By the way, did I tell you that I had been made Right Section
Commander?) After about half an hour I came back and settled down by a
fire made of smashed ammunition boxes in a stove borrowed from a ruined
cottage. I'm always ashamed that my letters contain so little news and
are so uninteresting. This thing is so big and dreadful that it does not
bear putting down on paper. I read the papers with the accounts of
singing soldiers and other rubbish; they depict us as though we were a
lot of hair-brained idiots instead of men fully realising our danger,
who plod on because it's our duty. I've seen a good many men killed by
now--we all have--consequently the singing soldier story makes us smile.
We've got a big job; we know that we've got to "Carry On" whatever
happens--so we wear a stern grin and go to it. There's far more heroism
in the attitude of men out here than in the footlight attitude that
journalists paint for the public. It isn't a singing matter to go on
firing a gun when gun-pits are going up in smoke within sight of you.

What a terrible desecration war is! You go out one week and look through
your glasses at a green, smiling country-little churches, villages
nestling among woods, white roads running across a green carpet; next
week you see nothing but ruins and a country-side pitted with
shell-holes. All night the machine guns tap like rivet-ting machines
when a New York sky-scraper is in the building. Then suddenly in the
night a bombing attack will start, and the sky grows white with signal