Our friend in the corner took my remarks extremely personally. To show his resentment of me, he pointedly offered the colonel some of his fodder. At last he said very haughtily, “It may interest you to know that I am the censor and am at present going up the line to give evidence against Lieutenant N. at his trial.” Just at that moment the train stopped at a station. He blinked through the window with his shortsighted eyes, trying to read the name “This is M., I think,” he said; “if it is, we stop here ten minutes and get time to stretch our legs.”
I looked out of the window helpfully. “It is M.,” I told him. It wasn't. He got out and commenced to walk up the platform. Almost immediately the train started to pull out. He made a wild crab-wise dash for the carriage-door, but the colonel and I were hanging to it on the inside. When we were safely on our journey, we shared up his pillows, rugs, hot-water bottles, and eatables between us, and had a comparatively pleasant journey. For once we thanked God for the censor.
It's tea-time at home. You've probably come in from a walk and are smoking a cigar at the family oak-table. I wish I could pop in on you.
Oh, our latest excitement! We received our new gramophone last night with about thirty of the latest records!
You'll be glad to know that I now have my old batman back. He's the man who took me out when I was wounded and was so tender to me on the way to the hospital. That memory of his tenderness is rather embarrassing, for I can't bring myself to strafe him the way I ought to. I can always see the fellow's concern when he thought that I was done for. Now that he's got me back he acts as though I were still a very weak and indiscreet person who had to be coaxed and managed. I have the feeling in his presence of being perpetually in pyjamas and in bed. He has the advantage of me, to put it in a nutshell.
It's early morning. I'm still sitting in the little dug-out with the slit that looks towards the Hun Front line. Everything but the immediate foreground is blanketed in heavy mist at present. I can hear bombing going on somewhere—but I can also hear a lark singing near to the sun, high overhead. The clumps of dandelions are still sleeping. They haven't opened—they're green instead of yellow. The grass sparkles with little drops of dew, more beautiful than the most costly diamonds. With the first of the dawn I read a story by Tolstoy; since then I've been sitting thinking—thinking of you and of the sleeping house in Newark, which will soon be disturbed by your bath-water running, if you still rise early; and thinking how strange it is that I should be here in the greatest war in history. We planned to do such different things with our lives. My first dream was to become extremely wise. At Oxford there seemed no limit to the amount of knowledge I could acquire; it seemed only a matter of patience and perseverance. Then that dream went, and I wanted to save the world. I'm afraid one has to be a little aristocratic towards the world before he can conceive of himself as capable of saving it or of the world as requiring saving. The aristocratic touch grew on me and I decided to do my saving not by touching people, but by writing poetry for the few who would understand. It wasn't half such good poetry as I thought it was at the time, and it never could have re-made anything. Disappointed in that and because I had now committed myself to a literary way of life, I took to writing novels, which nobody wanted to publish, read, or buy. Then, because I had to live somehow, I entered into the commercial end of publishing. There was always the shadow of a dream which I pursued even then in my spare hours; it was the dream that saved me and led me on to write The Garden Without Walls. But the shadow was growing fainter when this war commenced. And here I am, human at last, all touch of false aristocracy gone, peeping out across the grass wet with the dew of May, beneath which lie the common clay heroes who have died for democracy. How noiselessly these men gave up their lives and with how little consciousness of self-appreciation. They rather put us to shame—we privileged dawdlers in our haunted minds. They recognized the one straight thing to do when the opportunity presented itself; they did it swiftly and unreasoningly with their might. They didn't write about what they did; for them the doing was sufficient. I think I shall always be a humble man after such companionship, if I survive. I see life in courageous vistas of actions now; formerly I was like Hamlet—I thought myself into a green sickness. Marriage and children, a home and family love are the best that anyone can extract from life. There have been years when I didn't like my kind.