that if any of the other despatch riders were to publish their letters
you would find mine by comparison mild indeed. If George now could be
persuaded ...!

Secondly, I have dwelt at length upon little personal matters. It may
not interest you to know when I had a pork-chop--though, as you now
realise, on active service a pork-chop is extremely important--but it
interested my mother. She liked to know whether I was having good and
sufficient food, and warm things on my chest and feet, because, after
all, there was a time when I wanted nothing else.

Thirdly, all letters are censored. This book contains nothing but the
truth, but not the whole truth. When I described things that were
actually happening round me, I had to be exceedingly careful--and when,
as in the first two or three chapters, my letters were written several
weeks after the events, something was sure to crop up in the meantime
that unconsciously but definitely altered the memory of experiences....

We have known together two of the people I have mentioned in this
book--Alec and Gibson. They have both advanced so far that we have lost
touch with them. I had thought that it would be a great joy to publish a
first book, but this book is ugly with sorrow. I shall never be able to
write "Alec and I" again--and he was the sweetest and kindest of my
friends, a friend of all the world. Never did he meet a man or woman
that did not love him. The Germans have killed Alec. Perhaps among the
multitudinous Germans killed there are one or two German Alecs. Yet I am
still meeting people who think that war is a fine bracing thing for the
nation, a sort of national week-end at Brighton.

Then there was Gibson, who proved for all time that nobody made a better