There should be no neutrals, but everyone should bear some part of the burden.
If so large a part should fall to your share, you would be in so far
superior to other women and should be correspondingly proud.
There would be nothing to regret, for I could not have done otherwise
than I did, and I think I could not have done better.
Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something
even more wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse
to the good soldier.
==

The same note recurs in a letter of two weeks later (July 3):

==
Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me:
it is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters,
and I am ready to see it through to the end. Success in life
means doing that thing than which nothing else conceivable
seems more noble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable state
I can truly say that I enjoy, for had I the choice I would be
nowhere else in the world than where I am.
==

In this letter he says that an article about Rupert Brooke
in which his name was mentioned "gave him rather more pain than pleasure,
for it rubbed in the matter which most rankled in his heart,
that he never could get his book of poems published before the war."
However he consoles himself with the reflection that the M.S.
is probably as safe at Bruges as anywhere else. "We have finished
our eighth month on the firing line," he says, "and rumors are going round
of an imminent return to the rear for reorganization."