Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this
hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived
and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to
me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a
short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the
spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget.
To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as
it was long, long before the war--there was refreshment and renewal in
that! Once--last spring--I tried to base a novel on a striking war
incident which had come my way. Impossible! The zest and pleasure which
for any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story died away at
the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little "wind-warm"
space had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy
or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my
early recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago--and it was like
rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit
with me never to _write_ about the war; and outside the hours of writing
to think and talk of nothing else.

But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It
was partly I think because what you wrote summed up and drove home other
criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them
mechanically aside as not having any special reference to me; but in
reality they had haunted me. And now you make a personal appeal. You say
that England at the present moment is misunderstood, and even hardly
judged in America, and that even those great newspapers of yours that are
most friendly to the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with
English sympathies. Our mistakes--real and supposed--loom so large. We are
thought to be not taking the war seriously--even now. Drunkenness,
strikes, difficulties in recruiting the new armies, the losses of the