But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion
beside which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned
to make life worth while seem pale in comparison.
==

A report appeared in the American newspapers that he had been killed
in the battle of Champagne. On learning of it, he wrote to his mother:

==
I am `navre' to think of your having suffered so.
I should have arranged to cable after the attack, had I known
that any such absurd rumours had been started. Here one has
a wholesome notion of the unimportance of the individual.
It needs an effort of imagination to conceive of its making
any particular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under.
So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.
==

After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and did not return
to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital
for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness."
Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb.
As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life
suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind
by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished.
It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital.
On his recovery he obtained two months `conge de convalescence',
part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time,
much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession
of "Juvenilia". On April 13th he wrote to his mother: