picturing things I ought to have done--things I ought to have told you.
Always I can see, Oh, so vividly, the two sailor brothers waving
good-bye as the train moved off through the London dusk, and then that
other and forlorner group of three, standing outside the dock gates with
the sentry like the angel in Eden, turning them back from happiness.
With an extraordinary aloofness I watched myself moving like a puppet
away from you whom I love most dearly in all the world--going away as if
going were a thing so usual.

I'm asking myself again if there isn't some new fineness of spirit which
will develop from this war and survive it. In London, at a distance
from all this tragedy of courage, I felt that I had slipped back to a
lower plane; a kind of flabbiness was creeping into my blood--the old
selfish fear of life and love of comfort. It's odd that out here, where
the fear of death should supplant the fear of life, one somehow rises
into a contempt for everything which is not bravest. There's no doubt
that the call for sacrifice, and perhaps the supreme sacrifice, can
transform men into a nobility of which they themselves are unconscious.
That's the most splendid thing of all, that they themselves are unaware
of their fineness.

I'm now waiting to be relieved and am hurrying to finish this so that I
may mail it as soon as I get back to the battery. There's a whole sack
of letters and parcels waiting for me there, and I'm as eager to get to
them as a kiddy to inspect his Christmas stocking. I always undo the
string and wrappings with a kind of reverence, trying to picture the
dear kneeling figures who did them up. In London I didn't dare to let
myself go with you--I couldn't say all that was in my heart--it wouldn't
have been wise. Don't ever doubt that the tenderness was there. Even
though one is only a civilian in khaki, some of the soldier's sternness