This morning I was wakened up in the gunpit where I was sleeping by the
arrival of the most wonderful parcel of mail. It was really a kind of
Christmas morning for me. My servant had lit a fire in a punctured
petrol can and the place looked very cheery. First of all entered an
enormous affair, which turned out to be a stove which C. had sent. Then
there was a sand-bag containing all your gifts. You may bet I made for
that first, and as each knot was undone remembered the loving hands that
had done it up. I am now going up to a twenty-four-hour shift of
observing, and shall take up the malted milk and some blocks of
chocolate for a hot drink. It somehow makes you seem very near to me to
receive things packed with your hands. When I go forward I shall also
take candles and a copy of _Anne Veronica_ with me, so that if I get a
chance I can forget time.

Always when I write to you odds and ends come to mind, smacking of local
colour. After an attack some months ago I met a solitary private
wandering across a shell-torn field, I watched him and thought something
was wrong by the aimlessness of his progress. When I spoke to him, he
looked at me mistily and said, "Dead men. Moonlit road." He kept on
repeating the phrase, and it was all that one could get out of him.
Probably the dead men and the moonlit road were the last sights he had
seen before he went insane.

Another touching thing happened two days ago. A Major turned up who had
travelled fifty miles by motor lorries and any conveyance he could pick
up on the road. He had left his unit to come to have a glimpse of our
front-line trench where his son was buried. The boy had died there some
days ago in going over the parapet. I persuaded him that he ought not to
go alone, and that in any case it wasn't a healthy spot. At last he