CARRY ON
INTRODUCTION
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Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson Canadian Field Artillery

CARRY ON

LETTERS IN WAR TIME

BY

CONINGSBY DAWSON

NOVELIST AND SOLDIER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY HIS FATHER, W.J. DAWSON

1917

WHEN THE WAR’S AT AN END

At length when the war’s at an end
And we’re just ourselves,—you and I,
And we gather our lives up to mend,
We, who’ve learned how to live and to die:

Shall we think of the old ambition
For riches, or how to grow wise,
When, like Lazarus freshly arisen,
We’ve the presence of Death in our eyes?

Shall we dream of our old life’s passion,—
To toil for our heart’s desire,
Whose souls War has taken to fashion
With molten death and with fire?

I think we shall crave the laughter
Of the wind through trees gold with the sun,
When our strife is all finished,—after
The carnage of War is done.

Just these things will then seem worth while:—
How to make Life more wondrously sweet;
How to live with a song and a smile,
How to lay our lives at Love’s feet.

ERIC P. DAWSON,
Sub. Lieut. R.N.V.R.

INTRODUCTION

The letters in this volume were not written
for publication. They are intimate and
personal in a high degree. They would not now
be published by those to whom they are addressed,
had they not come to feel that the spirit
and temper of the writer might do something to
strengthen and invigorate those who, like himself,
are called on to make great sacrifices for
high causes and solemn duties.

They do not profess to give any new information
about the military operations of the Allies;
this is the task of the publicist, and at all times
is forbidden to the soldier in the field. Here and
there some striking or significant fact has been
allowed to pass the censor; but the value of the
letters does not lie in these things. It is found
rather in the record of how the dreadful yet
heroic realities of war affect an unusually sensitive
mind, long trained in moral and romantic
idealism; the process by which this mind adapts
itself to unanticipated and incredible conditions,
to acts and duties which lie close to horror, and
are only saved from being horrible by the efficacy
of the spiritual effort which they evoke. Hating
the brutalities of War, clearly perceiving the
wide range of its cruelties, yet the heart of the
writer is never hardened by its daily commerce
with death; it is purified by pity and terror, by
heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature
seems fresh annealed into a finer strength.

The intimate nature of these letters makes it
necessary to say something about the writer.

Coningsby Dawson graduated with honours in
history from Oxford in 1905, and in the same
year came to the United States with the intention
of taking a theological course at Union Seminary.
After a year at the Seminary he reached
the conclusion that his true lifework lay in literature,
and he at once began to fit himself for his
vocation. In the meantime his family left England,
and we had made our home in Taunton,
Massachusetts. Here, in a quiet house, amid
lawns and leafy elms, he gave himself with indefatigable
ardour to the art of writing. He wrote
from seven to ten hours a day, producing many
poems, short stories, and three novels. Few
writers have ever worked harder to attain literary
excellence, or have practised a more austere
devotion to their art. I often marvelled how a
young man, fresh from a brilliant career at the
greatest of English Universities, could be content
with a life that was so widely separated from
association with men and affairs. I wondered
still more at the patience with which he endured
the rebuffs that always await the beginner in
literature, and the humility with which he was
willing to learn the hard lessons of his apprenticeship
in literary form. The secret lay, no
doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and his
belief that good work could not fail in the end
to justify itself. But, not the less, these four
years of obscure drudgery wore upon his spirit,
and hence some of the references in these letters
to his days of self-despising. The period of
waiting came to an end at last with the publication
in 1913 of his Garden Without Walls,
which attained immediate success. When he
speaks in these letters of his brief burst of fame,
he refers to those crowded months in the Fall of
1913, when his novel was being discussed on
every hand, and, for the first time, he met many
writers of established reputation as an equal.

Another novel, The Raft, followed The
Garden Without Walls. The nature of his life
now seemed fixed. To the task of novel-writing
he had brought a temperament highly idealistic
and romantic, a fresh and vivid imagination, and
a thorough literary equipment. His life, as he
planned it, held but one purpose for him, outside
the warmth and tenacity of its affections—the
triumph of the efficient purpose in the adequate
expression of his mind in literature. The austerity
of his long years of preparation had left
him relatively indifferent to the common prizes
of life, though they had done nothing to lessen
his intense joy in life. His whole mind was concentrated
on his art. His adventures would be
the adventures of the mind in search of ampler
modes of expression. His crusades would be the
crusades of the spirit in search of the realities
of truth. He had received the public recognition
which gave him faith in himself and faith in his
ability to achieve the reputation of the true artist,
whose work is not cheapened but dignified and
broadened by success. So he read the future,
and so his critics read it for him. And then,
sudden and unheralded, there broke on this quiet
life of intellectual devotion the great storm of
1914. The guns that roared along the Marne
shattered all his purposes, and left him face to
face with a solemn spiritual exigency which admitted
no equivocation.

At first, in common with multitudes more experienced
than himself, he did not fully comprehend
the true measure of the cataclysm which
had overwhelmed the world. There had been
wars before, and they had been fought out by
standing armies. It was incredible that any war
should last more than a few months. Again and
again the world had been assured that war would
break down with its own weight, that no war
could be financed beyond a certain brief period,
that the very nature of modern warfare, with its
terrible engines of destruction, made swift decisions
a necessity. The conception of a British
War which involved the entire manhood of the
nation was new, and unparalleled in past history.
And the further conception of a war so vast in
its issues that it really threatened the very existence
of the nation was new too. Alarmists had
sometimes predicted these things, but they had
been disbelieved. Historians had used such
phrases of long past struggles, but often as a
mode of rhetoric rather than as the expression
of exact truth. Yet, in a very few weeks, it
became evident that not alone England, but the
entire fabric of liberal civilisation was threatened
by a power that knew no honour, no restraints
of either caution or magnanimity, no
ethic but the armed might that trampled under
blood-stained feet all the things which the common
sanction of centuries held dearest and fairest.

Perhaps, if Coningsby had been resident in
England, these realities of the situation would
have been immediately apparent. Residing in
America, the real outlines of the struggle were
a little dimmed by distance. Nevertheless, from
the very first he saw clearly where his duty lay.
He could not enlist immediately. He was bound
in honour to fulfil various literary obligations.
His latest book, Slaves of Freedom, was in
process of being adapted for serial use, and its
publication would follow. He set the completion
of this work as the period when he must enlist;
working on with difficult self-restraint toward
the appointed hour. If he had regrets for a
career broken at the very point where it had
reached success and was assured of more than
competence, he never expressed them. His one
regret was the effect of his enlistment on those
most closely bound to him by affections which
had been deepened and made more tender by the
sense of common exile. At last the hour came
when he was free to follow the imperative call
of patriotic duty. He went to Ottawa, saw Sir
Sam Hughes, and was offered a commission in
the Canadian Field Artillery on the completion
of his training at the Royal Military College, at
Kingston, Ontario. The last weeks of his training
were passed at the military camp of Petewawa
on the Ottawa River. There his family
was able to meet him in the July of 1916. While
we were with him he was selected, with twenty-four
other officers, for immediate service in
France; and at the same time his two younger
brothers enlisted in the Naval Patrol, then being
recruited in Canada by Commander Armstrong.

The letters in this volume commence with his
departure from Ottawa. Week by week they
have come, with occasional interruptions; mud
stained epistles, written in pencil, in dug-outs by
the light of a single candle, in the brief moments
snatched from hard and perilous duties. They
give no hint of where he was on the far-flung
battle-line. We know now that he was at Albert,
at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the taking of
the Regina trench, where, unknown to him, one
of his cousins fell in the heroic charge of the
Canadian infantry. His constant thoughtfulness
for those who were left at home is manifest in
all he writes. It has been expressed also in other
ways, dear and precious to remember: in flowers
delivered by his order from the battlefield each
Sabbath morning at our house in Newark, in
cables of birthday congratulations, which arrived
on the exact date. Nothing has been forgotten
that could alleviate the loneliness of our separation,
or stimulate our courage, or make us conscious
of the unbroken bond of love.

The general point of view in these letters is, I
think, adequately expressed in the phrase “Carry
On,” which I have used as the title of this book.
It was our happy lot to meet Coningsby in London
in the January of the present year, when he
was granted ten days’ leave. In the course of
conversation one night he laid emphasis on the
fact that he, and those who served with him,
were, after all, not professional soldiers, but
civilians at war. They did not love war, and
when the war was ended not five per cent of them
would remain in the army. They were men
who had left professions and vocations which
still engaged the best parts of their minds, and
would return to them when the hour came. War
was for them an occupation, not a vocation. Yet
they had proved themselves, one and all, splendid
soldiers, bearing the greatest hardships without
complaint, and facing wounds and death with
a gay courage which had made the Canadian
forces famous even among a host of men, equally
brave and heroic. The secret of their fortitude
lay in the one brief phrase, “Carry On.” Their
fortitude was of the spirit rather than the nerves.
They were aware of the solemn ideals of justice,
liberty, and righteousness for which they fought,
and would never give up till they were won. In
the completeness of their surrender to a great
cause they had been lifted out of themselves to
a new plane of living by the transformation of
their spirit. It was the dogged indomitable drive
of spiritual forces controlling bodily forces. Living
or dying those forces would prevail. They
would carry on to the end, however long the war,
and would count no sacrifice too great to assure
its triumph.

This is the spirit which breathes through these
letters. The splendour of war, as my son puts
it, is in nothing external; it is all in the souls of
the men. “There’s a marvellous grandeur about
all this carnage and desolation—men’s souls rise
above the distress—they have to, in order to survive.”
“Every man I have met out here has the
amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as
though it were a cap-and-bells.” They have
shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that
“corporate stout-heartedness” which is “the acme
of what Aristotle meant by virtue.” For himself,
he discovers that the plague of his former modes
of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of
the age. The doubt of many things which it were
wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt of one’s
own capacity for heroism. All those doubts and
self-despisings had vanished in the supreme surrender
to sacrificial duty. The doors of the
Kingdom of Heroism were flung so wide that the
meanest might enter in, and in that act the
humblest became comrades of Drake’s men, who
could jest as they died. No one knows his real
strength till it is put to the test; the highest joy
of life is to discover that the soul can meet the
test, and survive it.

The Somme battlefield, from which all these
letters were despatched, is an Inferno much more
terrible than any Dante pictured. It is a vast
sea of mud, full of the unburied dead, pitted and
pock-marked by shell-holes, treeless and horseless,
“the abomination of desolation.” And the
men who toil across it look more like outcasts
of the London Embankment than soldiers.
“They’re loaded down like pack-animals, their
shoulders are rounded, they’re wearied to death,
but they go on and go on…. There’s no flash
of sword or splendour of uniforms. They’re only
very tired men determined to carry on. The war
will be won by tired men who can never again
pass an insurance test.” Yet they carry on—the
“broken counter-jumper, the ragged ex-plumber,”
the clerk from the office, the man from the farm;
Londoner, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander,
men drawn from every quarter of the Empire,
who daily justify their manhood by devotion to
an ideal and by contempt of death. And in the
heart of each there is a settled conviction
that the cause for which they have sacrificed so
much must triumph. They have no illusions
about an early peace. They see their comrades
fall, and say quietly, “He’s gone West.” They do
heroic things daily, which in a lesser war would
have won the Victoria Cross, but in this war are
commonplaces. They know themselves re-born
in soul, and are dimly aware that the world is
travailing toward new birth with them. They
are still very human, men who end their letters
with a row of crosses which stand for kisses.
They are not dehumanised by war; the kindliness
and tenderness of their natures are unspoiled by
all their daily traffic in horror. But they have
won their souls; and when the days of peace return
these men will take with them to the
civilian life a tonic strength and nobleness which
will arrest and extirpate the decadence of society
with the saving salt of valour and of faith.

It may be said also that they do not hate their
foe, although they hate the things for which he
fights. They are fighting a clean fight, with men
whose courage they respect. A German prisoner
who comes into the British camp is sure of good
treatment. He is neither starved nor insulted.
His captors share with him cheerfully their rations
and their little luxuries. Sometimes a sullen
brute will spit in the face of his captor when
he offers him a cigarette; he is always an officer,
never a private. And occasionally between these
fighting hosts there are acts of magnanimity
which stand out illumined against the dark background
of death and suffering. One of the
stories told me by my son illustrates this. During
one fierce engagement a British officer saw a
German officer impaled on the barbed wire,
writhing in anguish. The fire was dreadful, yet
he still hung there unscathed. At length the
British officer could stand it no longer. He said
quietly, “I can’t bear to look at that poor chap
any longer.” So he went out under the hail of
shell, released him, took him on his shoulders and
carried him to the German trench. The firing
ceased. Both sides watched the act with wonder.
Then the Commander in the German trench came
forward, took from his own bosom the Iron
Cross, and pinned it on the breast of the British
officer. Such an episode is true to the holiest
ideals of chivalry; and it is all the more welcome
because the German record is stained by so many
acts of barbarism, which the world cannot forgive.

This magnanimous attitude toward the enemy
is very apparent in these letters. The man
whose mind is filled with great ideals of sacrifice
and duty has no room for the narrowness of
hate. He can pity a foe whose sufferings exceed
his own, and the more so because he knows
that his foe is doomed. The British troops do
know this to-day by many infallible signs. In
the early days of the war untrained men, poorly
equipped with guns, were pitted against the best
trained troops in Europe. The first Canadian
armies were sacrificed, as was that immortal
army of Imperial troops who saved the day at
Mons. The Canadians often perished in that
early fighting by the excess of their own reckless
bravery. They are still the most daring
fighters in the British army, but they have
profited by the hard discipline of the past. They
know now that they have not only the will to
conquer, but the means of conquest. Their, artillery
has become conspicuous for its efficiency.
It is the ceaseless artillery fire which has turned
the issue of the war for the British forces. The
work of the infantry is beyond praise. They “go
over the top” with superb courage, and all who
have seen them are ready to say with my son,
“I’m hats off to the infantry.” And in this final
efficiency, surpassing all that could have been
thought possible in the earlier stages of the war,
the British forces read the clear augury of victory.
The war will be won by the Allied armies;
not only because they fight for the better cause,
which counts for much, in spite of Napoleon’s
cynical saying that “God is on the side of the
strongest battalions”; but because at last they
have superiority in equipment, discipline and efficiency.
Upon that shell-torn Western front,
amid the mud and carnage of the Somme, there
has been slowly forged the weapon which will
drive the Teuton enemy across the Rhine, and
give back to Europe and the world unhindered
liberty and enduring peace.

W.J. DAWSON.

March, 1917.

THE LETTERS

In order to make some of the allusions in these
letters clear I will set down briefly the circumstances
which explain them, and supply a narrative
link where it may be required.

I have already mentioned the Military Camp
at Petewawa, on the Ottawa river. The Camp
is situated about seven miles from Pembroke.
The Ottawa river is at this point a beautiful
lake. Immediately opposite the Camp is a little
summer hotel of the simplest description. It
was at this hotel that my wife, my daughter, and
myself stayed in the early days of July, 1916.

The hotel was full of the wives of the officers
stationed in the Camp. During the daytime I
was the only man among the guests. About five
o’clock in the afternoon the officers from the
Camp began to arrive on a primitive motor ferryboat.
My son came over each day, and we often
visited him at the Camp. His long training at
Kingston had been very severe. It included besides
the various classes which he attended a great
deal of hard exercise, long rides or foot marches
over frozen roads before breakfast, and so forth.
After this strenuous winter the Camp at Petewawa
was a delightful change. His tent stood
on a bluff, commanding an exquisite view of the
broad stretch of water, diversified by many small
islands. We had a great deal of swimming in
the lake, and several motor-boat excursions to
its beautiful upper reaches. One afternoon
when we went over in our launch to meet him
at the Camp wharf, he told us that that day a
General had come from Ottawa to ask for
twenty-five picked officers to supply the casualties
among the Canadian Field Artillery at the
front. He had immediately volunteered and
been accepted.

At this time my two younger sons, who had
joined us at Petewawa in order to see their
brother, enrolled themselves in the Royal Naval
Motor Patrol Service, and had to return to Nelson,
British Columbia, to settle their affairs.
Near Nelson, on the Kootenay Lake, we have a
large fruit ranch, managed by my second son,
Reginald. My youngest son, Eric, was with a
law-firm in Nelson, and had just passed his final
examinations as solicitor and barrister.

This ranch had played a great part in our
lives. The scenery is among the finest in British
Columbia. We usually spent our summers
there, finding not only continual interest in the
development of our orchards, but a great deal of
pleasure in riding, swimming, and boating. We
had often talked of building a modern house
there, but had never done so. The original “little
shack” was the work of Reginald’s own
hands, in the days when most of the ranch was
primeval forest. It had been added to, but was
still of the simplest description. One reason
why we had not built a modern house was that
this “little shack” had become much endeared to
us by association and memory. We were all together
there more than once, and Coningsby
had written a great deal there. We built later
on a sort of summer library—a big room on the
edge of a beautiful ravine—to which reference
is made in later letters. Some of the happiest
days of our lives were spent in these lovely surroundings,
and the memory of those blue summer
days, amid the fragrance of miles of pine-forest,
often recurs to Coningsby as he writes
from the mud-wastes of the Somme.

We left Petewawa to go to the ranch before
Coningsby sailed for England, that we might
get our other two sons ready for their journey
to England. They left us on August 21st, and
the ranch was sub-let to Chinamen in the end
of September, when we returned to Newark,
New Jersey.

CARRY ON

I

OTTAWA, July 16th, 1916.

DEAREST ALL:

So much has happened since last I saw you
that it’s difficult to know where to start. On
Thursday, after lunch, I got the news that we
were to entrain from Petewawa next Friday
morning. I at once put in for leave to go to
Ottawa the next day until the following Thursday
at reveille. We came here with a lot of the
other officers who are going over and have been
having a very full time.

I am sailing from a port unknown on board
the Olympic with 6,000 troops—there is to be a
big convoy. I feel more than ever I did—and
I’m sure it’s a feeling that you share since visiting
the camp—that I am setting out on a Crusade
from which it would have been impossible
to withhold myself with honour. I go quite
gladly and contentedly, and pray that in God’s
good time we may all sit again in the little shack
at Kootenay and listen to the rustling of the orchard
outside. It will be of those summer days
that I shall be thinking all the time.

Yours, with very much love,

CON.

II

HALIFAX, July 23rd.

MY DEAR ONES:

We’ve spent all morning on the dock, seeing
to our baggage, and have just got leave
ashore for two hours. We have had letters
handed to us saying that on no account are we
to mention anything concerning our passage overseas,
neither are we allowed to cable our arrival
from the other side until four clear days have
elapsed.

You are thinking of me this quiet Sunday
morning at the ranch, and I of you. And I am
wishing—As I wish, I stop and ask myself,
“Would I be there if I could have my
choice?” And I remember those lines of Emerson’s
which you quoted:

“Though love repine and reason chafe,
There comes a voice without reply,
‘Twere man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the Truth he ought to die.”

I wouldn’t turn back if I could, but my heart
cries out against “the voice which speaks without
reply.”

Things are growing deeper with me in all sorts
of ways. Family affections stand out so desirably
and vivid, like meadows green after rain.
And religion means more. The love of a few
dear human people and the love of the divine
people out of sight, are all that one has to lean
on in the graver hours of life. I hope I come
back again—I very much hope I come back
again; there are so many finer things that I could
do with the rest of my days—bigger things. But
if by any chance I should cross the seas to stay,
you’ll know that that also will be right and as big
as anything that I could do with life, and something
that you’ll be able to be just as proud
about as if I had lived to fulfil all your other
dear hopes for me. I don’t suppose I shall talk
of this again. But I wanted you to know that
underneath all the lightness and ambition there’s
something that I learnt years ago in Highbury[1].
I’ve become a little child again in God’s hands,
with full confidence in His love and wisdom, and
a growing trust that whatever He decides for me
will be best and kindest.

This is the last letter I shall be able to send
to you before the other boys follow me. Keep
brave, dear ones, for all our sakes; don’t let any
of us turn cowards whatever ultimately happens.
We’ve a tradition to live up to now that
we have become a family of soldiers and sailors.

I shall long for the time when you come over
to England. Where will our meeting be and
when? Perhaps the war may be ended and then
won’t you be glad that we dared all this sorrow
of good-byes?

God bless and keep you,

CON.

III

ON BOARD,
July 27th, 1916.

My VERY DEAR PEOPLE:

Here we are scooting along across the
same old Atlantic we’ve crossed so many times
on journeys of pleasure. I’m at a loss to make
my letters interesting, as we are allowed to say
little concerning the voyage and everything is
censored.

There are men on board who are going back
to the trenches for the second time. One of
them is a captain in the Princess Pat’s, who is
badly scarred in his neck and cheek and thighs,
and has been in Canada recuperating. There is
also a young flying chap who has also seen service.
They are all such boys and so plucky in
the face of certain knowledge.

This morning I woke up thinking of our motor-tour
of two years ago in England, and especially
of our first evening at The Three Cups
in Dorset. I feel like running down there to
see it all again if I get any leave on landing.
How strange it will be to go back to Highbury
again like this! The little boy who ran back
and forth to school down Paradise Row little
thought of the person who to-day masquerades
as his elder self.

Heigho! I wish I could tell you a lot of
things that I’m not allowed to. This letter
would be much more interesting then.

In seventeen days the boys will also have left
you—so this will arrive when you’re horribly
lonely. I’m so sorry for you dear people—but
I’d be sorrier for you if we were all with you.
If I were a father or mother, I’d rather have
my sons dead than see them failing when the
supreme sacrifice was called for. I marvel all
the time at the prosaic and even coarse types of
men who have risen to the greatness of the occasion.
And there’s not a man aboard who
would have chosen the job ahead of him. One
man here used to pay other people to kill his
pigs because he couldn’t endure the cruelty of
doing it himself. And now he’s going to kill
men. And he’s a sample. I wonder if there is
a Lord God of Battles—or is he only an invention
of man and an excuse for man’s own actions.

Monday.

We are just in—safely arrived in spite of
everything. I hope you had no scare reports of
our having been sunk—such reports often get
about when a big troop ship is on the way.

I’m baggage master for my draft, and have to
get on deck now. You’ll have a long letter from
me soon.

Good-bye,
Yours ever,
Con.

IV

SHORNCLIFF, August 19th, 1916.

MY DEARESTS:

We haven’t had any hint of what is going
to happen to us—whether Field Artillery, the
Heavies or trench mortars. There seems little
doubt that we are to be in England for a little
while taking special courses.

I read father’s letter yesterday. You are very
brave—you never thought that you would be the
father of a soldier and sailors; and, as you say,
there’s a kind of tradition about the way in
which the fathers of soldiers and sailors should
act. Confess—aren’t you more honestly happy
to be our father as we are now than as we were?
I know quite well you are, in spite of the loneliness
and heartache. We’ve all been forced into
a heroism of which we did not think ourselves
capable. We’ve been carried up to the Calvary
of the world where it is expedient that a few
men should suffer that all the generations to
come may be better.

I understand in a dim way all that you suffer—the
sudden divorce of all that we had hoped
for from the present—the ceaseless questionings
as to what lies ahead. Your end of the business
is the worse. For me, I can go forward steadily
because of the greatness of the glory. I never
thought to have the chance to suffer in my body
for other men. The insufficiency of merely setting
nobilities down on paper is finished. How
unreal I seem to myself! Can it be true that I
am here and you are in the still aloofness of the
Rockies? I think the multitude of my changes
has blunted my perceptions. I trudge along like
a traveller between high hedgerows; my heart is
blinkered so that I am scarcely aware of landscapes.
My thoughts are always with you—I
make calculations for the differences of time that
I may follow more accurately your doings. I’d
love to come down to the study summer-house
and watch the blueness of the lake with you—I
love those scenes and memories more than any
in the world.

Good-bye for the present. Be brave.

Yours,

Con.

V

SHORNCLIFF, August 19th, 1916.

MY DEARS:

It’s not quite three weeks to-day since I
came to England, and it seems ages. The first
week was spent on leave, the second I passed my
exams in gun drill and gun-laying, and this week
I have finished my riding. Next Monday I start
on my gunnery.

Do you remember Captain S. at the Camp?
I had his young brother to dinner with me last
night-he’s just back from France minus an
eye. He lasted three and a half weeks, and was
buried four feet deep by a shell. He’s a jolly
boy, as cheerful as you could want and is very
good company. He gave me a vivid description.
He had a great boy-friend. At the start of the
war they both joined, S. in the Artillery, his
friend in the Mounted Rifles. At parting they
exchanged identification tokens. S.’s bore his
initials and the one word “Violets”—which
meant that they were his favourite flower and he
would like to have some scattered over him when
he was buried. His friend wore his initials and
the words “No flowers by request.” It was S.’s
first week out—they were advancing, having
driven back the enemy, and were taking up a
covered position in a wood from which to renew
their offensive. It was night, black as pitch, but
they knew that the wood must have been the
scene of fighting by the scuttling of the rats.
Suddenly the moon came out, and from beneath
a bush S. saw a face—or rather half a face—which
he thought he recognised, gazing up at
him. He corrects himself when he tells the
story, and says that it wasn’t so much the disfigured
features as the profile that struck him as
familiar. He bent down and searched beneath
the shirt, and drew out a little metal disc with
“No flowers by request” written on it.

I don’t know whether I ought to repeat things
like that to you, but the description was so
graphic. I have met many who have returned
from the Front, and what puzzles me in all of
them is their unawed acceptance of death. I
don’t think I could ever accept it as natural; it’s
too discourteous in its interruption of many
dreams and plans and loves.

Yours with very much love,

Con.

VI

SHORNCLIFF, August 30th, 1916.

MY DEARESTS:

I have just returned from sending you a
cable to let you know that I’m off to France.
The word came out in orders yesterday, and I
shall leave before the end of the week with a
draft of officers—I have been in England just a
day over four weeks. My only regret is that I
shall miss the boys who should be travelling up
to London about the same time as I am setting
out for the Front. After I have been there for
three months I am supposed to get a leave—this
should be due to me about the beginning of December,
and you can judge how I shall count on
it. Think of the meeting with R. and E., and
the immensity of the joy.

Selfishly I wish that you were here at this
moment—actually I’m glad that you are away.
Everybody goes out quite unemotionally and
with very few good-byes—we made far more
fuss in the old days about a week-end visit.

Now that at last it has come—this privileged
moment for which I have worked and waited—my
heart is very quiet. It’s the test of a character
which I have often doubted. I shall be
glad not to have to doubt it again. Whatever
happens, I know you will be glad to remember
that at a great crisis I tried to play the man, however
small my qualifications. We have always
lived so near to one another’s affections that this
going out alone is more lonely to me than to
most men. I have always had some one near at
hand with love-blinded eyes to see my faults as
springing from higher motives. Now I reach
out my hands across six thousand miles and only
touch yours with my imagination to say good-bye.
What queer sights these eyes, which have
been almost your eyes, will witness! If my hands
do anything respectable, remember that it is your
hands that are doing it. It is your influence as
a family that has made me ready for the part I
have to play, and where I go, you follow me.

Poor little circle of three loving persons,
please be tremendously brave. Don’t let anything
turn you into cowards—we’ve all got to
be worthy of each other’s sacrifice; the greater
the sacrifice may prove to be for the one the
greater the nobility demanded of the remainder.
How idle the words sound, and yet they will take
deep meanings when time has given them graver
sanctions. I think gallant is the word I’ve been
trying to find—we must be gallant English
women and gentlemen.

It’s been raining all day and I got very wet
this morning. Don’t you wish I had caught some
quite harmless sickness? When I didn’t want to
go back to school, I used to wet my socks purposely
in order to catch cold, but the cold always
avoided me when I wanted it badly. How far
away the childish past seems—almost as though
it never happened. And was I really the budding
novelist in New York? Life has become
so stern and scarlet—and so brave. From my
window I look out on the English Channel, a
cold, grey-green sea, with rain driving across it
and a fleet of small craft taking shelter. Over
there beyond the curtain of mist lies France—and
everything that awaits me.

News has just come that I have to start. Will
continue from France.

Yours ever lovingly,

Con.

VII

Friday, September 1st, 1916, 11 am.

DEAREST FATHER AND MOTHER:

I embark at 12.30—so this is the last line
before I reach France. I expect the boys are
now within sight of English shores—I wish I
could have had an hour with them.

I’m going to do my best to bring you honour—remember
that—I shall do things for your
sake out there, living up to the standards you
have taught me.

Yours with a heart full of love,

Con.

VIII

FRANCE, September 1st, 1916.

DEAREST M.:

Here I am in France with the same
strange smells and street cries, and almost the
same little boys bowling hoops over the very
cobbly cobble stones. I had afternoon tea at a
patisserie and ate a great many gâteaux for the
sake of old times. We had a very choppy crossing,
and you would most certainly have been
sick had you been on board. It seemed to me
that I must be coming on one of those romantic
holidays to see churches and dead history—only
the khaki-clad figures reminded me that I was
coming to see history in the making. It’s a
funny world that batters us about so. It’s three
years since I was in France—the last time was
with Arthur in Provence. It’s five years since
you and I did our famous trip together.

I wish you were here—there are heaps of English
nurses in the streets. I expect to sleep in
this place and proceed to my destination to-morrow.
How I wish I could send you a really descriptive
letter! If I did, I fear you would not
get it—so I have to write in generalities. None
of this seems real—it’s a kind of wild pretence
from which I shall awake-and when I tell you
my dream you’ll laugh and say, “How absurd
of you, dreaming that you were a soldier. I
must say you look like it.”

Good-bye, my dearest girl,

God bless you,

Con.

IX

September 8th, 1916.

MY DEAREST ONES:

I’m sending this to meet you on your return
from Kootenay. I left England on September
1st and had a night at my point of disembarkation,
and then set off on a wandering adventure
in search of my division. I’m sure
you’ll understand that I cannot enter into any
details—I can only give you general and purely
personal impressions. There were two other
officers with me, both from Montreal. We had
to picnic on chocolate and wine for twenty-four
hours through our lack of forethought in not supplying
ourselves with food for the trip. I shaved
the first morning with water from the exhaust
of a railroad engine, having first balanced my
mirror on the step. The engineer was fascinated
with my safety razor. There were Tommies
from the trenches in another train, muddied to
the eyes—who showed themselves much more resourceful.
They cooked themselves quite admirable
meals as they squatted on the rails, over
little fires on which they perched tomato cans.
Sunday evening we saw our first German prisoners—a
young and degenerate-looking lot. Sunday
evening we got off at a station in the rain,
and shouldered our own luggage. Our luggage,
by the way, consists of a sleeping bag, in which
much of our stuff is packed, and a kit sack—for
an immediate change and toilet articles one
carries a haversack hung across the shoulder.
Well, as I say, we alighted and coaxed a military
wagon to come to our rescue. As we set off
through a drizzling rain, trudging behind the
cart, a double rainbow shone, which I took for
an omen. Presently we came to a rest camp,
where we told our sad story of empty tummies,
and were put up for the night. A Jock—all
Highlanders are called Jock—looked after us.
Next morning we started out afresh in a motor
lorry and finished at a Y.M.C.A. tent, where
we stayed two nights. On Wednesday we met
the General in Command of our Division, who
posted me to the battery, which is said to be the
best in the best brigade in the best division—so
you may see I’m in luck. I found the battery
just having come out of action—we expect to go
back again in a day or two. Major B. is the
O.C.—a fine man. The lieutenant who shares
my tent won the Military Cross at Ypres last
Spring. I’m very happy—which will make you
happy—and longing for my first taste of real
war.

How strangely far away I am from you—all
the experiences so unshared and different. Long
before this reaches you I shall have been in action
several times. This time three years ago
my streak of luck came to me and I was prancing
round New York. To-day I am much more
genuinely happy in mind, for I feel, as I never
felt when I was only writing, that I am doing
something difficult which has no element of self
in it. If I come back, life will be a much less
restless affair.

This letter! I can imagine it being delivered
and the shout from whoever takes it and the
comments. I make the contrast in my mind—this
little lean-to spread of canvas about four
feet high, the horse-lines, guns, sentries going up
and down—and then the dear home and the well-loved
faces.

Good-bye. Don’t be at all nervous.

Yours lovingly,

Con.

X

September 12th, Tuesday.

DEAREST M.:

You will already have received my first
letters giving you my address over here. The
wagon has just come up to our position, but it has
brought me only one letter since I’ve been across.
I’m sitting in my dug-out with shells passing over
my head with the sound of ripping linen. I’ve
already had the novel experience of firing a battery,
and to-morrow I go up to the first line
trenches.

It’s extraordinary how commonplace war becomes
to a man who is thrust among others who
consider it commonplace. Not fifty yards away
from me a dead German lies rotting and uncovered—I
daresay he was buried once and then
blown out by a shell.

Wednesday, 7 p.m.

Your letters came two hours ago—the first to
reach me here—and I have done little else but
read and re-read them. How they bring the old
ways of life back with their love and longing!
Dear mother’s tie will be worn to-morrow, and
it will be ripping to feel that it was made by her
hands. Your cross has not arrived yet, dear.
Your mittens will be jolly for the winter. I’ve
heard nothing from the boys yet.

To-day I took a trip into No-Man’s Land—when
the war is ended I’ll be able to tell you all
about it. I think the picture is photographed
upon my memory forever. There’s so much
you would like to hear and so little I’m allowed
to tell. Ask G.M.’C. if he was at Princeton with
a man named Price—an instructor there.

You ought to see the excitement when the
water-cart brings us our mail and the letters are
handed out. Some of the gunners have evidently
told their Canadian girls that they are officers,
and so they are addressed on their letters as
lieutenants. I have to censor some of their replies,
and I can tell you they are as often funny
as pathetic. The ones to their mothers are childish,
too, and have rows of kisses. I think men
are always kiddies if you look beneath the surface.
The snapshots did fill me with a wanting
to be with you in Kootenay. But that’s not
where you’ll receive this. There’ll probably be
a fire in the sitting-room at home, and a strong
aroma of coffee and tobacco. You’ll be sitting
in a low chair before the fire and your fingers
rubbing the hair above your left ear as you read
this aloud. I’d like to walk in on you and say,
“No more need for letters now.” Some day
soon, I pray and expect.

Tell dear Papa and Mother that their answers
come next. What a lot of love you each one
manage to put into your written pages! I’m
afraid if I let myself go that way I might make
you unhappy.

Since writing this far I have had supper. I’m
now sleeping in a new dug-out and get a shower
of mould on my sleeping-kit each time the guns
are fired. One doesn’t mind that particularly,
especially when you know that the earth walls
make you safe. I have a candle in an old petrol
tin and dodge the shadows as I write. You
know, this artillery game is good sport and
one takes everything as it comes with a joke.
The men are splendid—their cheeriness comes
up bubbling whenever the occasion calls for the
dumps. Certainly there are fine qualities which
war, despite its unnaturalness, develops. I’m
hats off to every infantry private I meet nowadays.

God bless you and all of you.

Yours lovingly, Con.

The reference in the previous letter to a
cross is to a little bronze cross of Francis of
Assisi.

Many years ago I visited Assisi, and, on leaving,
the monks gave me four of these small
bronze crosses, assuring me that those who wore
them were securely defended in all peril by the
efficacious prayers of St. Francis.
Just before Coningsby left Shorncliff to go to
France he wrote to us and asked if we couldn’t
send him something to hang round his neck for
luck. We fortunately had one of these crosses
of St. Francis at the ranch, and his sister—the
M. of these letters-sent it to him. It arrived
safely, and he has worn it ever since.

XI

September 15th, 1916.

DEAR FATHER:

Your last letter to me was written on a
quiet morning in August—in the summer house
at Kootenay. It came up yesterday evening on a
water-cart from the wagon-lines to a scene a
little in contrast.

It’s a fortnight to-day since I left England,
and already I’ve seen action. Things move
quickly in this game, and it is a game—one
which brings out both the best and the worst
qualities in a man. If unconscious heroism is
the virtue most to be desired, and heroism spiced
with a strong sense of humour at that, then
pretty well every man I have met out here has
the amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as
though it were a cap-and-bells. To do that for
the sake of corporate stout-heartedness is, I think,
the acme of what Aristotle meant by virtue. A
strong man, or a good man or a brainless man,
can walk to meet pain with a smile on his mouth
because he knows that he is strong enough to
bear it, or worthy enough to defy it, or because
he is such a fool that he has no imagination.
But these chaps are neither particularly strong,
good, nor brainless; they’re more like children,
utterly casual with regard to trouble, and quite
aware that it is useless to struggle against their
elders. So they have the merriest of times while
they can, and when the governess, Death, summons
them to bed, they obey her with unsurprised
quietness. It sends the mercury of one’s
optimism rising to see the way they do it. I
search my mind to find the bigness of motive
which supports them, but it forever evades me.
These lads are not the kind who philosophise
about life; they’re the sort, many of them, who
would ordinarily wear corduroys and smoke a
cutty pipe. I suppose the Christian martyrs
would have done the same had corduroys been
the fashion in that day, and if a Roman Raleigh
had discovered tobacco.

I wrote this about midnight and didn’t get any
further, as I was up till six carrying on and firing
the battery. After adding another page or
two I want to get some sleep, as I shall probably
have to go up to the observation station to watch
the effect of fire to-night. But before I turn in
I want to tell you that I had the most gorgeous
mail from everybody. Now that I’m in touch
with you all again, it’s almost like saying “How-do?”
every night and morning.

I daresay you’ll wonder how it feels to be under
shell-fire. This is how it feels—you don’t
realise your danger until you come to think about
it afterwards—at the time it’s like playing coconut
shies at a coon’s head—only you’re the coon’s
head. You take too much interest in the sport
of dodging to be afraid. You’ll hear the Tommies
saying if one bursts nearly on them, “Line,
you blighter, line. Five minutes more left,” just
as though they were reprimanding the unseen
Hun battery for rotten shooting.

The great word of the Tommies here is “No
bloody bon”—a strange mixture of French and
English, which means that a thing is no good.
If it pleases them it’s Jake—though where Jake
comes from nobody knows.

Now I must get a wink or two, as I don’t
know when I may have to start off.

Ever yours, with love,

CON.

XII

September 19th, 1916.

Dearest Mother:

I’ve been in France 19 days, and it hasn’t
taken me long to go into action. Soon I shall
be quite an old hand. I’m just back from 24
hours in the Observation Post, from which one
watches the effect of fire. I understand now and
forgive the one phrase which the French children
have picked up from our Tommies on account
of its frequent occurrence—”bl—— mud.”
I never knew that mud could be so thick and
treacly. All my fear that I might be afraid under
shell-fire is over—you get to believe that if
you’re going to be hit you’re going to be. But
David’s phrase keeps repeating itself in my mind,
“Ten thousand shall fall at thy side, etc., but it
shall not come nigh unto thee.” It’s a curious
thing that the men who are most afraid are those
who get most easily struck. A friend of G.M.C.’s
was hit the other day within thirty yards of me—he
was a Princeton chap. I mentioned him in
one of my previous letters. Our right section
commander got a blighty two days ago and is
probably now in England. He went off on a
firing battery wagon, grinning all over his face,
saying he wouldn’t sell that bit of blood and
shrapnel for a thousand pounds. I’m wearing
your tie—it’s the envy of the battery. All the
officers wanted me to give them the name of my
girl. It never occurs to men that mothers will
do things like that.

Thank the powers it has stopped raining and
we’ll be able to get dry. I came in plastered
from head to foot with lying in the rain on my
tummy and peering over the top of a trench.
Isn’t it a funny change from comfortable breakfasts,
press notices and a blazing fire?

Do you want any German souvenirs? Just at
present I can get plenty. I have a splendid
bayonet and a belt with Kaiser Bill’s arms on
it—but you can’t forward these things from
France. The Germans swear that they’re not
using bayonets with saw-edges, but you can buy
them for five francs from the Tommies—ones
they’ve taken from the prisoners or else picked
up.

You needn’t be nervous about me. I’m a
great little dodger of whizz-bangs. Besides I
have a superstition that there’s something in the
power of M.’s cross to bless. It came with the
mittens, and is at present round my neck.

You know what it sounds like when they’re
shooting coals down an iron run-way into a
cellar-well, imagine a thousand of them.
That’s what I’m hearing while I write.

God bless you; I’m very happy.

Yours ever,

Con.

XIII

September 19th, 1916.

Dearest Father:

I’m writing you your birthday letter early,
as I don’t know how busy I may be in the next
week, nor how long this may take to reach you.
You know how much love I send you and how
I would like to be with you. D’you remember
the birthday three years ago when we set the
victrola going outside your room door? Those
were my high-jinks days when very many things
seemed possible. I’d rather be the person I am
now than the person I was then. Life was
selfish though glorious.

Well, I’ve seen my first modern battlefield and
am quite disillusioned about the splendour of
war. The splendour is all in the souls of the
men who creep through the squalor like vermin—it’s
in nothing external. There was a chap
here the other day who deserved the V.C. four
times over by running back through the Hun
shell fire to bring news that the infantry wanted
more artillery support. I was observing for my
brigade in the forward station at the time. How
he managed to live through the ordeal nobody
knows. But men laugh while they do these
things. It’s fine.

A modern battlefield is the abomination of
abominations. Imagine a vast stretch of dead
country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had
been mutilated with small-pox. There’s not a
leaf or a blade of grass in sight. Every house
has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird
sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is
at night—the scurry of rats. You enter a kind
of ditch, called a trench; it leads on to another
and another in an unjoyful maze. From the
sides feet stick out, and arms and faces—the
dead of previous encounters. “One of our
chaps,” you say casually, recognising him by his
boots or khaki, or “Poor blighter—a Hun!”
One can afford to forget enmity in the presence
of the dead. It is horribly difficult sometimes
to distinguish between the living and the slaughtered—they
both lie so silently in their little kennels
in the earthen bank. You push on—especially
if you are doing observation work, till you
are past your own front line and out in No
Man’s Land. You have to crouch and move
warily now. Zing! A bullet from a German
sniper. You laugh and whisper, “A near one,
that.” My first trip to the trenches was up to
No Man’s Land. I went in the early dawn and
came to a Madame Tussaud’s show of the dead,
frozen into immobility in the most extraordinary
attitudes. Some of them were part way
out of the ground, one hand pressed to the
wound, the other pointing, the head sunken and
the hair plastered over the forehead by repeated
rains. I kept on wondering what my companions
would look like had they been three weeks
dead. My imagination became ingeniously and
vividly morbid. When I had to step over them
to pass, it seemed as though they must clutch at
my trench coat and ask me to help. Poor lonely
people, so brave and so anonymous in their
death! Somewhere there is a woman who loved
each one of them and would give her life for my
opportunity to touch the poor clay that had been
kind to her. It’s like walking through the day
of resurrection to visit No Man’s Land. Then
the Huns see you and the shrapnel begins to
fall—you crouch like a dog and run for it.

One gets used to shell-fire up to a point, but
there’s not a man who doesn’t want to duck when
he hears one coming. The worst of all is the
whizz-bang, because it doesn’t give you a
chance—it pounces and is on you the same moment
that it bangs. There’s so much I wish that
I could tell you. I can only say this, at the moment
we’re making history.

What a curious birthday letter! I think of all
your other birthdays—the ones before I met
these silent men with the green and yellow faces,
and the blackened lips which will never speak
again. What happy times we have had as a
family—what happy jaunts when you took me
in those early days, dressed in a sailor suit, when
you went hunting pictures. Yet, for all the
damnability of what I now witness, I was never
quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an
imperative self-denial brings a peace which self-seeking
never brought.

So don’t let this birthday be less gay for my
absence. It ought to be the proudest in your
life—proud because your example has taught
each of your sons to do the difficult things which
seem right. It would have been a condemnation
of you if any one of us had been a shirker.

“I want to buy fine things for you
And be a soldier if I can.”

The lines come back to me now. You read
them to me first in the dark little study from a
green oblong book. You little thought that I
would be a soldier—even now I can hardly realise
the fact. It seems a dream from which I
shall wake up. Am I really killing men day by
day? Am I really in jeopardy myself?

Whatever happens I’m not afraid, and I’ll give
you reason to be glad of me.

Very much love,
CON.

The poem referred to in this letter was actually
written for Coningsby when he was between
five and six years old. The dark little study
which he describes was in the old house at Wesley’s
Chapel, in the City Road, London—and it
was very dark, with only one window, looking
out upon a dingy yard. The green oblong book
in which I used to write my poems I still have;
and it is an illustration of the tenacity of a child’s
memory that he should recall it. The poem was
called A Little Boy’s Programme, and ran thus:

I am so very young and small,
That, when big people pass me by,
I sometimes think they are so high
I’ll never be a man at all.

And yet I want to be a man
Because so much I want to do;
I want to buy fine things for you,
And be a soldier, if I can.

When I’m a man I will not let
Poor little children starve, or be
Ill-used, or stand and beg of me
With naked feet out in the wet.

Now, don’t you laugh!—The father kissed
The little serious mouth and said
“You’ve almost made me cry instead,
You blessed little optimist.”

XIV

September 21st, 1916.

My Very Dear M.:

I am wearing your talisman while I write
and have a strong superstition in its efficacy.
The efficacy of your socks is also very noticeable—I
wore them the first time on a trip to the
Forward Observation Station. I had to lie on
my tummy in the mud, my nose just showing
above the parapet, for the best part of twenty-four
hours. Your socks little thought I would
take them into such horrid places when you made
them.

Last night both the King and Sir Sam sent us
congratulations—I popped in just at the right
time. I daresay you know far more about our
doings than I do. Only this morning I picked
up the London Times and read a full account of
everything I have witnessed. The account is
likely to be still fuller in the New York papers.

“Home for Christmas”—that’s what the Tommies
are promising their mothers and sweethearts
in all their letters that I censor. Yesterday
I was offered an Imperial commission in
the army of occupation. But home for Christmas,
will be Christmas, 1917—I can’t think that
it will be earlier.

Very much love,

CON.

XV

Sunday, September 24th, 1916.

DEAREST MOTHER:

Your locket has just reached me, and I
have strung it round my neck with M.’s cross.
Was it M.’s cross the other night that accounted
for my luck? I was in a gun-pit when a shell
landed, killing a man only a foot away from me
and wounding three others—I and the sergeant
were the only two to get out all right. Men
who have been out here some time have a dozen
stories of similar near squeaks. And talking of
squeaks, it was a mouse that saved one man. It
kept him awake to such an extent that he determined
to move to another place. Just as he got
outside the dug-out a shell fell on the roof.

You’ll be pleased to know that we have a ripping
chaplain or Padre, as they call chaplains,
with us. He plays the game, and I’ve struck up
a great friendship with him. We discuss literature
and religion when we’re feeling a bit fed
up. We talk at home of our faith being tested—one
begins to ask strange questions here when
he sees what men are allowed by the Almighty
to do to one another, and so it’s a fine thing to
be in constant touch with a great-hearted chap
who can risk his life daily to speak of the life
hereafter to dying Tommies.

I wish I could tell you of my doings, but it’s
strictly against orders. You may read in the
papers of actions in which I’ve taken part and
never know that I was there.

We live for the most part on tinned stuff, but
our appetites make anything taste palatable.
Living and sleeping in the open air keeps one
ravenous. And one learns to sleep the sleep of
the just despite the roaring of the guns.

God bless you each one and give us peaceful*
hearts.

Yours ever,

Con.

XVI

September 28th, 1916.

My Dears:

We’re in the midst of a fine old show, so
I don’t get much opportunity for writing. Suffice
it to say that I’ve seen the big side of war by
now and the extraordinary uncalculating courage
of it. Men run out of a trench to an attack
with as much eagerness as they would display
in overtaking a late bus. If you want to
get an idea of what meals are like when a row
is on, order the McAlpin to spread you a table
where 34th crosses Broadway—and wait for the
uptown traffic on the Elevated. It’s wonderful
to see the waiters dodging with dishes through
the shell-holes.

It’s a wonderful autumn day, golden and mellow;
I picture to myself what this country must
have looked like before the desolation of war
struck it.

I was Brigade observation officer on September
26th, and wouldn’t have missed what I saw
for a thousand dollars. It was a touch and go
business, with shells falling everywhere and machine-gun
fire—but something glorious to remember.
I had the great joy of being useful in
setting a Hun position on fire. I think the war
will be over in a twelvemonth.

Our great joy is composing menus of the
meals we’ll eat when we get home. Good-bye
for the present.

CON.

XVII

October 1st, 1916.

MY DEAREST M.:

Sunday morning, your first back in Newark.
You’re not up yet owing to the difference
in time—I can imagine the quiet house with
the first of the morning stealing greyly in.
You’ll be presently going to church to sit in your
old-fashioned mahogany pew. There’s not
much of Sunday in our atmosphere—only the
little one can manage to keep in his heart. I
shall share the echo of yours by remembering.

I’m waiting orders at the present moment to
go forward with the Colonel and pick out a new
gun position. You know I’m very happy-satisfied
for the first time I’m doing something big
enough to make me forget all failures and self-contempts.
I know at last that I can measure
up to the standard I have always coveted for myself.
So don’t worry yourselves about any note
of hardship that you may interpret into my letters,
for the deprivation is fully compensated for
by the winged sense of exaltation one has.

Things have been a little warm round us
lately. A gun to our right, another to our rear
and another to our front were knocked out with
direct hits. We’ve got some of the chaps taking
their meals with us now because their mess
was all shot to blazes. There was an officer who
was with me at the 53rd blown thirty feet into
the air while I was watching. He picked himself
up and insisted on carrying on, although his
face was a mass of bruises. I walked in on the
biggest engagement of the entire war the moment
I came out here. There was no gradual
breaking-in for me. My first trip to the front
line was into a trench full of dead.

Have you seen Lloyd George’s great speech?
I’m all with him. No matter what the cost and
how many of us have to give our lives, this War
must be so finished that war may be forever at
an end. If the devils who plan wars could only
see the abysmal result of their handiwork!
Give them one day in the trenches under shell-fire
when their lives aren’t worth a five minutes’
purchase—or one day carrying back the wounded
through this tortured country, or one day in a
Red Cross train. No one can imagine the damnable
waste and Christlessness of this battering
of human flesh. The only way that this War can
be made holy is by making it so thorough that
war will be finished for all time.

Papa at least will be awake by now. How
familiar the old house seems to me—I can think
of the place of every picture. Do you set the
victrola going now-a-days? I bet you play
Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue.

Please send me anything in the way of eatables
that the goodness of your hearts can imagine—also
smokes.

Later.

I came back from the front-line all right and
have since been hard at it firing. Your letters
reached me in the midst of a bombardment—I
read them in a kind of London fog of gun-powder
smoke, with my steel helmet tilted back,
in the interval of commanding my section
through a megaphone.

Don’t suppose that I’m in any way unhappy—I’m
as cheerful as a cricket and do twice as
much hopping—I have to. There’s something
extraordinarily bracing about taking risks and
getting away with it—especially when you know
that you’re contributing your share to a far-reaching
result. My mother is the mother of a
soldier now, and soldiers’ mothers don’t lie
awake at night imagining—they just say a prayer
for their sons and leave everything in God’s
hands. I’m sure you’d far rather I died than
not play the man to the fullest of my strength.
It isn’t when you die that matters—it’s how.
Not but what I intend to return to Newark and
make the house reek of tobacco smoke before
I’ve done.

We’re continually in action now, and the casualty
to B. has left us short-handed—moreover
we’re helping out another battery which has lost
two officers. As you’ve seen by the papers,
we’ve at last got the Hun on the run. Three
hundred passed me the other day unescorted,
coming in to give themselves up as prisoners.
They’re the dirtiest lot you ever set eyes on, and
looked as though they hadn’t eaten for months.
I wish I could send you some souvenirs. But
we can’t send them out of France.

I’m scribbling by candlelight and everything’s
jumping with the stamping of the guns. I wear
the locket and cross all the time.

Yours with much love,

Con.

XVIII

October 13th, 1916.

DEAR ONES:

I have only time to write and assure you
that I am safe. We’re living in trenches at
present—I have my sleeping bag placed on a
stretcher to keep it fairly dry. By the time you
get this we expect to be having a rest, as we’ve
been hard at it now for an unusually long time.
How I wish that I could tell you so many things
that are big and vivid in my mind-but the censor—!

Yesterday I had an exciting day. I was up
forward when word came through that an officer
still further forward was wounded and he’d
been caught in a heavy enemy fire. I had only
a kid telephonist with me, but we found a
stretcher, went forward and got him out. The
earth was hopping up and down like pop-corn
in a frying pan. The unfortunate thing was
that the poor chap died on the way out. It was
only the evening before that we had dined together
and he had told me what he was going to
do with his next leave.

God bless you all,

CON.

XIX

October 14th, 1916.

DEAREST MOTHER:

I’m still all right and well. To-day I had
the funniest experience of my life—got caught
in a Hun curtain of fire and had to lie on my
tummy for two hours in a trench with the shells
bursting five yards from me—and never a
scratch. You know how I used to wonder what
I’d do under such circumstances. Well, I
laughed. All I could think of was the sleek people
walking down Fifth Avenue, and the equally
sleek crowds taking tea at the Waldorf. It
struck me as ludicrous that I, who had been one
of them, should be lying there lunchless. For
a little while I was slightly deaf with the concussions.

That poem keeps on going through my head,

Oh, to come home once more, when the dusk is falling,
To see the nursery lighted and the children’s table spread;
“Mother, mother, mother!” the eager voices calling,
“The baby was so sleepy that he had to go to bed!”

Wouldn’t it be good, instead of sitting in a
Hun dug-out?

Yours lovingly,

CON.

XX

October 15th, 1916.

Dear Ones:

We’re still in action, but are in hopes that
soon we may be moved to winter quarters.
We’ve had our taste of mud, and are anxious to
move into better quarters before we get our next.
I think I told you that our O.C. had got
wounded in the feet, and our right section commander
got it in the shoulder a little earlier—so
we’re a bit short-handed and find ourselves with
plenty of work.

I have curiously lucid moments when recent
happenings focus themselves in what seems to be
their true perspective. The other night I was
Forward Observation officer on one of our recent
battlefields. I had to watch the front all
night for signals, etc. There was a full white
moon sailing serenely overhead, and when I
looked at it I could almost fancy myself back in
the old melancholy pomp of autumn woodlands
where the leaves were red, not with the colour
of men’s blood. My mind went back to so many
by-gone days-especially to three years ago. I
seemed so vastly young then, upon reflection.
For a little while I was full of regrets for many
things wasted, and then I looked at the battlefield
with its scattered kits and broken rifles.
Nothing seemed to matter very much. A rat
came out-then other rats. I stood there feeling
extraordinarily aloof from all things that
can hurt, and—you’ll smile—I planned a novel.
O, if I get back, how differently I shall write!
When you’ve faced the worst in so many forms,
you lose your fear and arrive at peace. There’s
a marvellous grandeur about all this carnage and
desolation—men’s souls rise above the distress—they
have to in order to survive. When you see
how cheap men’s bodies are you cannot help but
know that the body is the least part of personality.

You can let up on your nervousness when
you get this, for I shall almost certainly be in a
safer zone. We’ve done more than our share
and must be withdrawn soon. There’s hardly
a battery which does not deserve a dozen
D.S.O.’s with a V.C. or two thrown in.

It’s 4.30 now—you’ll be in church and, I hope,
wearing my flowers. Wait till I come back and
you shall go to church with the biggest bunch
of roses that ever were pinned to a feminine
chest. I wonder when that will be.

We have heaps of humour out here. You
should have seen me this morning, sitting on the
gun-seat while my batman cut my hair. A sand-bag
was spread over my shoulders in place of a
towel and the gun-detachment stood round and
gave advice. I don’t know what I look like, for
I haven’t dared to gaze into my shaving mirror.

Good luck to us all,

CON

XXI

October 18th, 1910

Dearest M.:

I’ve come down to the lines to-day; to-morrow
I go back again. I’m sitting alone in
a deep chalk dug-out—it is 10 p.m. and I have
lit a fire by splitting wood with a bayonet.
Your letters from Montreal reached me yesterday.
They came up in the water-cart when we’d
all begun to despair of mail. It was wonderful
the silence that followed while every one went
back home for a little while, and most of them
met their best girls. We’ve fallen into the habit
of singing in parts. Jerusalem the Golden
is a great favourite as we wait for our breakfast—we
go through all our favourite songs, including
Poor Old Adam Was My Father. Our
greatest favourite is one which is symbolising
the hopes that are in so many hearts on this
greatest battlefield in history. We sing it under
shell-fire as a kind of prayer, we sing it as
we struggle knee-deep in the appalling mud, we
sing it as we sit by a candle in our deep captured
German dug-outs. It runs like this:

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams:

There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you.”

You ought to be able to get it, and then you will
be singing it when I’m doing it.

No, I don’t know what to ask from you for
Christmas—unless a plum pudding and a general
surprise box of sweets and food stuffs. If
you don’t mind my suggesting it, I wouldn’t a
bit mind a Christmas box at once—a schoolboy’s
tuck box. I wear the locket, cross, and tie all
the time as kind of charms against danger—they
give me the feeling of loving hands going with
me everywhere.

God bless you.

Yours ever,

CON.

XXII

October 23, 1916

Dearest All:

As you know I have been in action ever
since I left England and am still. I’ve lived in
various extemporised dwellings and am at present
writing from an eight foot deep hole dug in
the ground and covered over with galvanised
iron and sand-bags. We have made ourselves
very comfortable, and a fire is burning—I correct
that—comfortable until it rains, I should
say, when the water finds its own level. We
have just finished with two days of penetrating
rain and mist—in the trenches the mud was up
to my knees, so you can imagine the joy of wading
down these shell-torn tunnels. Good thick
socks have been priceless.

You’ll be pleased to hear that two days ago
I was made Right Section Commander—which
is fairly rapid promotion. It means a good deal
more work and responsibility, but it gives me a
contact with the men which I like.

I don’t know when I’ll get leave—not for another
two months anyway. It would be ripping
if I had word in time for you to run over to
England for the brief nine days.

I plan novels galore and wonder whether I
shall ever write them the way I see them now.
My imagination is to an extent crushed by the
stupendousness of reality. I think I am changed
in some stern spiritual way—stripped of flabbiness.
I am perhaps harder—I can’t say. That
I should be a novelist seems unreasonable—it’s
so long since I had my own way in the world
and met any one on artistic terms. But I have
enough ego left to be very interested in my book.
And by the way, when we’re out at the front and
the battery wants us to come in they simply
phone up the password, “Slaves of Freedom,”
the meaning of which we all understand.

You are ever in my thoughts, and I pray the
day may not be far distant when we meet again.

CON.

XXIII

October 27th, 1916.

Dearest Family:

All to-day I’ve been busy registering our
guns. There is little chance of rest—one would
suppose that we intended to end the war by spring.

Two new officers joined our battery from
England, which makes the work lighter. One
of them brings the news that D., one of the two
officers who crossed over from England with me
and wandered through France with me in search
of our Division, is already dead. He was a
corking fellow, and I’m very sorry. He was
caught by a shell in the head and legs.

I am still living in a sand-bagged shell-hole
eight feet beneath the level of the ground. I
have a sleeping bag with an eider-down inside
it, for my bed; it is laid on a stretcher, which
is placed in a roofed-in trench. For meals,
when there isn’t a block on the roads, we do very
well; we subscribe pretty heavily to the mess, and
have an officer back at the wagon-lines to do our
purchasing. When we move forward into a new
position, however, we go pretty short, as roads
have to be built for the throng of traffic. Most
of what we eat is tinned—and I never want to
see tinned salmon again when this war is ended.
I have a personal servant, a groom and two
horses—but haven’t been on a horse for seven
weeks on account of being in action. We’re all
pretty fed up with continuous firing and living
so many hours in the trenches. The way artillery
is run to-day an artillery lieutenant is
more in the trenches than an infantryman—the
only thing he doesn’t do is to go over the parapet
in an attack. And one of our chaps did that
the other day, charging the Huns with a bar of
chocolate in one hand and a revolver in the
other. I believe he set a fashion which will be
imitated. Three times in my experience I have
seen the infantry jump out of their trenches
and go across. It’s a sight never to be forgotten.
One time there were machine guns behind
me and they sent a message to me, asking me to
lie down and take cover. That was impossible,
as I was observing for my brigade, so I lay on
the parapet till the bullets began to fall too close
for comfort, then I dodged out into a shell-hole
with the German barrage bursting all around
me, and had a most gorgeous view of a modern
attack. That was some time ago, so you needn’t
be nervous.

Have I mentioned rum to you? I never
tasted it to my knowledge until I came out here.
We get it served us whenever we’re wet. It’s
the one thing which keeps a man alive in the
winter—you can sleep when you’re drenched
through and never get a cold if you take it.

At night, by a fire, eight feet underground,
we sing all the dear old songs. We manage a
kind of glee—Clementina, The Long, Long Trail,
Three Blind Mice, Long, Long Ago, Rock of
Ages. Hymns are quite favourites.

Don’t worry about me; your prayers weave
round me a mantle of defence.

Yours with more love than I can write,

CON.

XXIV

October 31st, 1916.
Hallowe’en.

Dearest People:

Once more I’m taking the night-firing and
so have a chance to write to you. I got letters
from you all, and they each deserve answers, but
I have so little time to write. We’ve been having
beastly weather—drowned out of our little
houses below ground, with rivers running through
our beds. The mud is once more up to our knees
and gets into whatever we eat. The wonder is
that we keep healthy—I suppose it’s the open air.
My throat never troubles me and I’m free from
colds in spite of wet feet. The main disadvantage
is that we rarely get a chance to wash or
change our clothes. Your ideas of an army with
its buttons all shining is quite erroneous; we look
like drunk and disorderlies who have spent the
night in the gutter—and we have the same instinct
for fighting.

In the trenches the other day I heard mother’s
Suffolk tongue and had a jolly talk with a chap
who shared many of my memories. It was his
first trip in and the Huns were shelling badly, but
he didn’t seem at all upset.

We’re still hard at it and have given up all
idea of a rest—the only way we’ll get one is with
a blighty. You say how often you tell yourselves
that the same moon looks down on me; it does,
but on a scene how different! We advance over
old battlefields—everything is blasted. If you
start digging, you turn up what’s left of something
human. If there were any grounds for superstition,
surely the places in which I have been
should be ghost-haunted. One never thinks
about it. For myself I have increasingly the feeling
that I am protected by your prayers; I tell
myself so when I am in danger.

Here I sit in an old sweater and muddy
breeches, the very reverse of your picture of a
soldier, and I imagine to myself your receipt of
this. Our chief interest is to enquire whether
milk, jam and mail have come up from the wagon-lines;
it seems a faery-tale that there are places
where milk and jam can be had for the buying.
See how simple we become.

Poor little house at Kootenay! I hate to think
of it empty. We had such good times there
twelve months ago. They have a song here to a
nursery rhyme lilt, Après le Guerre Finis; it
goes on to tell of all the good times we’ll have
when the war is ended. Every night I invent a
new story of my own celebration of the event,
usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before I fall
asleep—only it doesn’t seem possible that the war
will ever end.

I hear from the boys very regularly. There’s
just the chance that I may get leave to London
in the New Year and meet them before they set
out. I always picture you with your heads high
in the air. I’m glad to think of you as proud
because of the pain we’ve made you suffer.

Once again I shall think of you on Papa’s
birthday. I don’t think this will be the saddest
he will have to remember. It might have been
if we three boys had still all been with him. If
I were a father, I would prefer at all costs that
my sons should be men. What good comrades
we’ve always been, and what long years of happy
times we have in memory—all the way down
from a little boy in a sailor-suit to Kootenay!

I fell asleep in the midst of this. I’ve now got
to go out and start the other gun firing. With
very much love.

Yours,

CON.

XXV

November 1st, 1916.

My Dearest M.:

Peace after a storm! Your letter was not
brought up by the water-wagon this evening, but
by an orderly—the mud prevented wheel-traffic.
I was just sitting down to read it when Fritz began
to pay us too much attention. I put down
your letter, grabbed my steel helmet, rushed out
to see where the shells were falling, and then
cleared my men to a safer area. (By the way,
did I tell you that I had been made Right Section
Commander?) After about half an hour I
came back and settled down by a fire made of
smashed ammunition boxes in a stove borrowed
from a ruined cottage. I’m always ashamed that
my letters contain so little news and are so uninteresting.
This thing is so big and dreadful
that it does not bear putting down on paper. I
read the papers with the accounts of singing soldiers
and other rubbish; they depict us as though
we were a lot of hair-brained idiots instead of
men fully realising our danger, who plod on because
it’s our duty. I’ve seen a good many men
killed by now—we all have—consequently the
singing soldier story makes us smile. We’ve got
a big job; we know that we’ve got to “Carry
On” whatever happens—so we wear a stern grin
and go to it. There’s far more heroism in the
attitude of men out here than in the footlight attitude
that journalists paint for the public. It
isn’t a singing matter to go on firing a gun when
gun-pits are going up in smoke within sight of
you.

What a terrible desecration war is! You go
out one week and look through your glasses at a
green, smiling country-little churches, villages
nestling among woods, white roads running
across a green carpet; next week you see nothing
but ruins and a country-side pitted with shell-holes.
All night the machine guns tap like rivet-ting
machines when a New York sky-scraper is
in the building. Then suddenly in the night a
bombing attack will start, and the sky grows
white with signal rockets. Orders come in for
artillery retaliation, and your guns begin to stamp
the ground like stallions; in the darkness on every
side you can see them snorting fire. Then stillness
again, while Death counts his harvest; the
white rockets grow fainter and less hysterical.
For an hour there is blackness.

My batman consoles himself with singing,

“Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.”

There’s a lot in his philosophy—it’s best to go on
smiling even when some one who was once your
pal lies forever silent in his blanket on a
stretcher.

The great uplifting thought is that we have
proved ourselves men. In our death we set a
standard which in ordinary life we could never
have followed. Inevitably we should have sunk
below our highest self. Here we know that the
world will remember us and that our loved ones,
in spite of tears, will be proud of us. What God
will say to us we cannot guess—but He can’t be
too hard on men who did their duty. I think we
all feel that trivial former failures are washed out
by this final sacrifice. When little M. used to
recite “Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
who never to himself had said, ‘This is my own,
my native land,'” I never thought that I should
have the chance that has now been given to me.
I feel a great and solemn gratitude that I have
been thought worthy. Life has suddenly become
effective and worthy by reason of its carelessness
of death.

By the way, that Princeton man I mentioned so
long ago was killed forty yards away from me
on my first trip into the trenches. Probably G.
M’C. and his other friends know by now. He
was the first man I ever saw snuffed out.

I’m wearing your mittens and find them a great
comfort. I’ll look forward to some more of your
socks—I can do with plenty of them. If any of
your friends are making things for soldiers, I
wish you’d get them to send them to this battery,
as they would be gratefully accepted by the men.

I wish I could come to The Music Master with
you. I wonder how long till we do all those intimately
family things together again.

Good-bye, my dearest M. I live for home letters
and am rarely disappointed.

God bless you, and love to you all.

Yours ever,

CON.

XXVI

November 4th, 1916.

My Dearest Mother:

This morning I was wakened up in the
gunpit where I was sleeping by the arrival of the
most wonderful parcel of mail. It was really a
kind of Christmas morning for me. My servant
had lit a fire in a punctured petrol can and the
place looked very cheery. First of all entered an
enormous affair, which turned out to be a stove
which C. had sent. Then there was a sand-bag
containing all your gifts. You may bet I made
for that first, and as each knot was undone remembered
the loving hands that had done it up.
I am now going up to a twenty-four-hour shift
of observing, and shall take up the malted milk
and some blocks of chocolate for a hot drink.
It somehow makes you seem very near to me to
receive things packed with your hands. When
I go forward I shall also take candles and a copy
of Anne Veronica with me, so that if I get a
chance I can forget time.

Always when I write to you odds and ends
come to mind, smacking of local colour. After
an attack some months ago I met a solitary private
wandering across a shell-torn field, I
watched him and thought something was wrong
by the aimlessness of his progress. When I
spoke to him, he looked at me mistily and said,
“Dead men. Moonlit road.” He kept on repeating
the phrase, and it was all that one could
get out of him. Probably the dead men and the
moonlit road were the last sights he had seen before
he went insane.

Another touching thing happened two days ago.
A Major turned up who had travelled fifty miles
by motor lorries and any conveyance he could
pick up on the road. He had left his unit to
come to have a glimpse of our front-line trench
where his son was buried. The boy had died
there some days ago in going over the parapet. I
persuaded him that he ought not to go alone, and
that in any case it wasn’t a healthy spot. At last
he consented to let me take him to a point from
which he could see the ground over which his
son had attacked and led his men. The sun
was sinking behind us. He stood there very
straightly, peering through my glasses—and then
forgot all about me and began speaking to his son
in childish love-words. “Gone West,” they call
dying out here—we rarely say that a man is dead.
I found out afterwards that it was the boy’s
mother the Major was thinking of when he
pledged himself to visit the grave in the front-line.

But there are happier things than that. For
instance, you should hear us singing at night in
our dug-out—every tune we ever learnt, I believe.
Silver Threads Among the Gold, In the
Gloaming, The Star of Bethlehem, I Hear You
Calling Me, interspersed with Everybody Works
but Father, and Poor Old Adam, etc.

I wish I could know in time when I get my
leave for you to come over and meet me. I’m
going to spend my nine days in the most glorious
ways imaginable. To start with I won’t eat anything
that’s canned and, to go on, I won’t get out
of bed till I feel inclined. And if you’re
there—!

Dreams and nonsense! God bless you all and
keep us near and safe though absent. Alive or
“Gone West” I shall never be far from you; you
may depend on that—and I shall always hope to
feel you brave and happy. This is a great
game—cheese-mites pitting themselves against all
the splendours of Death. Please, please write
well ahead, so that I may not miss your Christmas
letters.

Yours lovingly,

CON.

XXVII

November 6th, 1916.

My Dear Ones:

Such a wonderful day it has been—I
scarcely know where to start. I came down last
night from twenty-four hours in the mud, where
I had been observing. I’d spent the night in a
hole dug in the side of the trench and a dead
Hun forming part of the roof. I’d sat there re-living
so many things—the ecstatic moments of
my life when I first touched fame—and my feet
were so cold that I could not feel them, so I
thought all the harder of the pleasant things of
the past. Then, as I say, I came back to the gun
position to learn that I was to have one day off
at the back of the lines. You can’t imagine what
that meant to me—one day in a country that is
green, one day where there is no shell-fire, one
day where you don’t turn up corpses with your
tread! For two months I have never left the
guns except to go forward and I have never been
from under shell-fire. All night long as I have
slept the ground had been shaken by the stamping
of the guns—and now after two months, to
come back to comparative normality! The reason
for this privilege being granted was that the
powers that he had come to the conclusion that
it was time I had a bath. Since I sleep in my
clothes and water is too valuable for washing
anything but the face and hands, they were probably
right in their guess at my condition.

So with the greatest holiday of my life in prospect
I went to the empty gunpit in which I sleep,
and turned in. This morning I set out early with
my servant, tramping back across the long, long
battlefields which our boys have won. The mud
was knee-deep in places, but we floundered on
till we came to our old and deserted gun-position
where my horses waited for me. From there I
rode to the wagon-lines—the first time I’ve sat
a horse since I came into action. Far behind
me the thunder of winged murder grew
more faint. The country became greener; trees
even had leaves upon them which fluttered against
the grey-blue sky. It was wonderful—like
awaking from an appalling nightmare. My little
beast was fresh and seemed to share my joy,
for she stepped out bravely.

When I arrived at the wagon-lines I would not
wait—I longed to see something even greener and
quieter. My groom packed up some oats and
away we went again. My first objective was the
military baths; I lay in hot water for half-an-hour
and read the advertisements of my book.
As I lay there, for the first time since I’ve been
out, I began to get a half-way true perspective of
myself. What’s left of the egotism of the author
came to life, and—now laugh—I planned my next
novel—planned it to the sound of men singing,
because they were clean for the first time in
months. I left my towels and soap with a military
policeman, by the roadside, and went prancing
off along country roads in search of the almost
forgotten places where people don’t kill one
another. Was it imagination? There seemed
to me to be a different look in the faces of the
men I met—for the time being they were neither
hunters nor hunted. There were actually cows
in the fields. At one point, where pollarded trees
stand like a Hobbema sketch against the sky, a
group of officers were coursing a hare, following
a big black hound on horseback. We lost our
way. A drenching rainstorm fell over us—we
didn’t care; and we saw as we looked back a
most beautiful thing—a rainbow over green fields.
It was as romantic as the first rainbow in childhood.

All day I have been seeing lovely and familiar
things as though for the first time. I’ve been a
sort of Lazarus, rising out of his tomb and praising
God at the sound of a divine voice. You
don’t know how exquisite a ploughed field can
look, especially after rain, unless you have feared
that you might never see one again.

I came to a grey little village, where civilians
were still living, and then to a gate and a garden.
In the cottage was a French peasant woman who
smiled, patted my hair because it was curly, and
chattered interminably. The result was a huge
omelette and a bottle of champagne. Then came
a touch of naughtiness—a lady visitor with a
copy of La Vie Parisienne, which she promptly
bestowed on the English soldier. I read it, and
dreamt of the time when I should walk the
Champs Elysées again. It was growing dusk
when I turned back to the noise of battle. There
was a white moon in a milky sky. Motor-bikes
fled by me, great lorries driven by Jehus from
London buses, and automobiles which too poignantly
had been Strand taxis and had taken lovers
home from the Gaiety. I jogged along thinking
very little, but supremely happy. Now I’m back
at the wagon-line; to-morrow I go back to the
guns. Meanwhile I write to you by a guttering
candle.

Life, how I love you! What a wonderful
kindly thing I could make of you to-night.
Strangely the vision has come to me of all that
you mean. Now I could write. So soon you
may go from me or be changed into a form of
existence which all my training has taught me
to dread. After death is there only nothingness?
I think that for those who have missed love in
this life there must be compensations—the little
children whom they ought to have had, perhaps.
To-day, after so many weeks, I have seen little
children again.

And yet, so strange a havoc does this war work
that, if I have to “Go West,” I shall go proudly
and quietly. I have seen too many men die
bravely to make a fuss if my turn comes. A
mixed passenger list old Father Charon must
have each night—Englishmen, Frenchmen, and
Huns. To-morrow I shall have another sight
of the greenness and then—the guns.

I don’t know whether I have been able to make
any of my emotions clear to you in my letters.
Terror has a terrible fascination. Up to now I
have always been afraid—afraid of small fears.
At last I meet fear itself and it stings my pride
into an unpremeditated courage.

I’ve just had a pile of letters from you all.
How ripping it is to be remembered! Letters
keep one civilised.

It’s late and I’m very tired. God bless you
each and all.

CON.

XXVIII

November 15th, 1916.

Dear Father:

I’ve owed you a letter for some time, but
I’ve been getting very little leisure. You can’t
send steel messages to the Kaiser and love-notes
to your family in the same breath.

I am amazed at the spirit you three are showing
and almighty proud that you can muster
such courage. I suppose none of us quite realised
our strength till it came to the test. There
was a time when we all doubted our own heroism.
I think we were typical of our age. Every novel
of the past ten years has been more or less a
study in sentiment and self-distrust. We used
to wonder what kind of stuff Drake’s men were
made of that they could jest while they died.
We used to contrast ourselves with them to our
own disfavour. Well, we know now that when
there’s a New World to be discovered we can
still rise up reincarnated into spiritual pirates.
It wasn’t the men of our age who were at fault,
but the New World that was lacking. Our New
World is the Kingdom of Heroism, the doors of
which are flung so wide that the meanest of us
may enter. I know men out here who are the
dependable daredevils of their brigades, who in
peace times were nuisances and as soon as peace
is declared will become nuisances again. At the
moment they’re fine, laughing at Death and smiling
at the chance of agony. There’s a man I
know of who had a record sheet of crimes.
When he was out of action he was always drunk
and up for office. To get rid of him, they put
him into the trench mortars and within a month
he had won his D.C.M. He came out and went
on the spree—this particular spree consisted in
stripping a Highland officer of his kilts on a
moonlight night. For this he was sentenced to
several months in a military prison, but asked to
be allowed to serve his sentence in the trenches.
He came out from his punishment a King’s sergeant—which
means that whatever he did nobody
could degrade him. He got this for lifting
his trench mortar over the parapet when all the
detachment were killed. Carrying it out into a
shell-hole, he held back the Hun attack and saved
the situation. He got drunk again, and again
chose to be returned to the trenches. This time
his head was blown off while he was engaged in
a special feat of gallantry. What are you to say
to such men? Ordinarily they’d be blackguards,
but war lifts them into splendour. In the same
way you see mild men, timid men, almost girlish
men, carrying out duties which in other wars
would have won V.C.’s. I don’t think the soul
of courage ever dies out of the race any more
than the capacity for love. All it means is that
the occasion is not present. For myself I try
to analyse my emotions; am I simply numb, or
do I imitate other people’s coolness and shall I
fear life again when the war is ended? There
is no explanation save the great army phrase
“Carry on.” We “carry on” because, if we
don’t, we shall let other men down and put their
lives in danger. And there’s more than that—we
all want to live up to the standard that
prompted us to come.

One talks about splendour—but war isn’t
splendid except in the individual sense. A man
by his own self-conquest can make it splendid
for himself, but in the massed sense it’s squalid.
There’s nothing splendid about a battlefield when
the fight is ended—shreds of what once were men,
tortured, levelled landscapes—the barbaric loneliness
of Hell. I shall never forget my first dead
man. He was a signalling officer, lying in the
dawn on a muddy hill. I thought he was asleep
at first, but when I looked more closely, I saw
that his shoulder blade was showing white
through his tunic. He was wearing black boots.
It’s odd, but the sight of black boots have the
same effect on me now that black and white
stripes had in childhood. I have the superstitious
feeling that to wear them would bring me
bad luck.

Tonight we’ve been singing in parts, Back
in the Dear Dead Days Beyond Recall—a mournful
kind of ditty to sing under the circumstances—so
mournful that we had to have a game
of five hundred to cheer us up.

It’s now nearly 2 a.m., and I have to go out to
the guns again before I go to bed. I carry your
letters about in my pockets and read them at odd
intervals in all kinds of places that you can’t
imagine.

Cheer up and remember that I’m quite happy.
I wish you could be with me for just one day
to understand.

Yours,

CON.

XXIX

December 3rd, 1916.

Dear Boys:

By this time you will be all through your
exams and I hope have both passed. It’ll be
splendid if you can go together to the same station.
You envy me, you say; well, I rather envy
you. I’d like to be with you. You, at least,
don’t have Napoleon’s fourth antagonist with
which to contend—mud. But at present I’m
clean and billeted in an estaminet, in a not too
bad little village. There’s an old mill and still
older church, and the usual farmhouses with the
indispensable pile of manure under the front
windows. We shall have plenty of hard work
here, licking our men into shape and re-fitting.

You know how I’ve longed to sleep between
sheets; I can now, but find them so cold that I
still use my sleeping bag—such is human inconsistency.
But yesterday I had a boiling bath—as
good a bath as could be found in a New York
hotel—and I am CLEAN.

I woke up this morning to hear some one singing
Casey Jones—consequently I thought of
former Christmases. My mind has been travelling
back very much of late. Suddenly I see
something here which reminds me of the time
when E. and I were at Lisieux, or even of our
Saturday excursions to Nelson when we were all
together at the ranch.

Did I tell you that B., our officer who was
wounded two months ago, has just returned to
us. This morning he got news that his young
brother has been killed in the place which we have
left. I wonder when we shall grow tired of
stabbing and shooting and killing. It seems to me
that the war cannot end in less than two years.

I have made myself nice to the Brigade interpreter
and he has found me a delightful room
with electric light and a fire. It’s in an old
farmhouse with a brick terrace in front. My
room is on the ground floor and tile-paved. The
chairs are rush-bottomed and there are old quaint
china plates on the shelves. There is also a
quite charming mademoiselle. So you see, you
don’t need to pity me any more.

Just at present I’m busy getting up the Brigade
Christmas Entertainment. The Colonel asked
me to do it, otherwise I should have said no, as
I want all the time I can get to myself. You
can’t think how jolly it is to sit again in a room
which is temporarily yours after living in dug-outs,
herded side by side with other men. I can
be me now, and not a soldier of thousands when
I write. You shall hear from me again soon.
Hope you’re having a ripping time in London.

Yours ever,
CON.

XXX

December 5th, 1916.

DEAREST M.:

I’ve just come in from my last tour of
inspection as orderly officer, and it’s close on
midnight. I’m getting this line off to you to let
you know that I expect to get my nine days’
leave about the beginning of January. How I
wish it were possible to have you in London when
I arrive, or, failing that, to spend my leave in
New York!

To-morrow I make an early start on horseback
for a market of the old-fashioned sort which
is held at a town near by. Can you dimly picture
me with my groom, followed by a mess-cart,
going from stall to stall and bartering with
the peasants? It’ll be rather good fun and something
quite out of my experience.

Christmas will be over by the time you get this,
and I do hope that you had a good one. I paused
to talk to the other officers; they say that they
are sure that you are very beautiful and have a
warm heart, and would like to send them a five-storey
layer cake, half a dozen bottles of port
and one Paris chef. At present I am the Dives
of the mess and dole out luxuries to these Lazaruses.

Good-bye for the present.

Yours ever lovingly,

CON.

XXXI

December 6th, 1916.

Dearest M.:

I’ve just undone your Christmas parcels,
and already I am wearing the waistcoat and
socks, and my mouth is hot with the ginger.

I expect to get leave for England on January
10th. I do wish it might be possible for some
of you to cross the ocean and be in London with
me—and I don’t see what there is to prevent you.
Unless the war ends sooner than any of us expect,
it is not likely that I shall get another leave
in less than nine months. So, if you want to
come and if there’s time when you receive this
letter, just hop on a boat and let’s see what London
looks like together.

I wonder what kind of a Christmas you’ll have.
I shall picture it all. You may hear me tiptoeing
up the stairs if you listen very hard. Where
does the soul go in sleep? Surely mine flies back
to where all of you dear people are.

I came back to my farm yesterday to find a
bouquet of paper flowers at the head of my bed
with a note pinned on it. Over my fire-place was
hung a pathetic pair of farm-girls’ heavy Sunday
boots, all brightly polished, with two other
notes pinned on them. The Feast of St. Nicholas
on December 7th is an opportunity for unmarried
men to be reminded that there are unmarried
girls in the world—wherefore the flowers.
I enclose the notes. Keep them,—they may be
useful for a book some day.

I’m having a pretty good rest, and am still in
my old farmhouse.

Love to all.

CON.

XXXII

December 15th, 1916.

Dearest All:

At the present I’m just where mother
hoped I’d be—in a deep dug-out about twenty
feet down—we’re trying to get a fire lighted, and
consequently the place is smoked out. Where
I’ll be for Christmas I don’t know, but I hope
by then to be in billets. I’ve just come back from
the trenches, where I’ve been observing. The
mud is not nearly so bad where I am now, and
with a few days’ more work, we should be quite
comfortable. You’ll have received my cable
about my getting leave soon—I’m wondering
whether the Atlantic is sufficiently quiet for any
of you to risk a crossing.

Poor Basil! Your letter was the first news I
got of his death. I must have watched the attack
in which he lost his life. One wonders now
how it was that some instinct did not warn me
that one of those khaki dots jumping out of the
trenches was the cousin who stayed with us in
London.

I’m wondering what this mystery of the German
Chancellor is all about—some peace proposals,
I suppose—which are sure to prove bombastic
and unacceptable. It seems to us out here
as though the war must go on forever. Like
a boy’s dream of the far-off freedom of manhood,
the day appears when we shall step out into
the old liberty of owning our own lives. What
a celebration we’ll have when I come home! I
can’t quite grasp the joy of it.

I’ve got to get this letter off quite soon if it’s
to go to-day. It ought to reach, you by January
12th or thereabouts. You may be sure my
thoughts will have been with you on Christmas
day. I shall look back and remember all the by-gone
good times and then plan for Christmas,
1917. God keep us all.

Ever yours,

CON.

XXXIII

December 18th, 1916.

My Dearest M.:

I always feel when I write a joint letter
to the family that I’m cheating each one of you,
but it’s so very difficult to get time to write as
often as I’d like. It’s a week to Christmas and
I picture the beginnings of the preparations. I
can look back and remember so many such
preparations, especially when we were kiddies in
London. What good times one has in a life!
I’ve been sitting with my groom by the fire to-night
while he dried my clothes. I’ve mentioned
him to you before as having lived in Nelson, and
worked at the Silver King mine. We both grew
ecstatic over British Columbia.

I am hoping all the time that the boys may be
in England at the time I get my leave—I hardly
dare hope that any of you will be there. But
it would he grand if you could manage it—I long
very much to see you all again. I can just
imagine my first month home again. I shan’t
let any of you work. I shall be the incurable
boy. I’ve spent the best part of to-day out in
No Man’s Land, within seventy yards of the
Huns. Quite an experience, I assure you, and
one that I wouldn’t have missed for worlds. I’ll
have heaps to write into novels one day—the
vividest kind of local colour. Just at present I
have nothing to read but the Christmas number
of the Strand. It makes me remember the time
when we children raced for the latest development
of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and so
many occasions when I had one of “those sniffy
colds” and sat by the Highbury fire with a book.
Good days, those!

I’m just off to bed now, and will finish this to-morrow.
Bed is my greatest luxury nowadays.

December 19th.

The book and chocolate just came, and a bunch
of New York papers. All were most welcome.
I was longing for something to read. To-morrow
I have to go forward to observe. Two of
our officers are on leave, so it makes the rest of
us work pretty hard. What do you think of
the Kaiser’s absurd peace proposals? The man
must be mad.

The best of love,

CON.

XXXIV

December 20th, 1916.

Dear Mr. T.:

Just back from a successful argument with
Fritz, to find your kind good wishes. It’s rather
a lark out here, though a lark which may turn
against you any time. I laugh a good deal more
than I mope. Anything really horrible has a
ludicrous side—it’s like Mark Twain’s humour—a
gross exaggeration. The maddest thing of all
to me is that a person so willing to be amiable
as I am should be out here killing people for
principle’s sake. There’s no rhyme or reason—it
can’t be argued. Dimly one thinks he sees
what is right and leaves father and mother and
home, as though it were for the Kingdom of
Heaven’s sake. Perhaps it is. If one didn’t pin
his faith to that “perhaps”—. One can’t explain.

A merry Christmas to you.
Yours very sincerely,
CONINGSBY DAWSON.

XXXV

December 20th, 1916.

Dear Mr. A.D.:

I’ve just come in from an argument with
Fritz when your chocolate formed my meal.
You were very kind to think of me and to send
it, and you were extraordinarily understanding in
the letter that you sent me. One’s life out here
is like a pollarded tree—all the lower branches
are gone—one gazes on great nobilities, on the
fascinating horror of Eternity sometimes—I said
horror, but it’s often fine in its spaciousness—one
gazes on many inverted splendours of Titans,
but it’s giddy work being so high and rarefied,
and all the gentle past seems gone. That’s why
it is pleasant in this grimy anonymity of death
and courage to get reminders, such as your letter,
that one was once localised and had a familiar
history. If I come back, I shall be like Rip Van
Winkle, or a Robinson Crusoe—like any and all
of the creatures of legend and history to whom
abnormality has grown to seem normal. If you
can imagine yourself living in a world in which
every day is a demonstration of a Puritan’s conception
of what happens when the last trump
sounds, then you have some idea of my queer
situation. One has come to a point when death
seems very inconsiderable and only failure to
do one’s duty is an utter loss. Love and the future,
and all the sweet and tender dreams of by-gone
days are like a house in which the blinds
are lowered and from which the sight has gone.
Landscapes have lost their beauty, everything
God-made and man-made is destroyed except
man’s power to endure with a smile the things
he once most dreaded, because he believes that
only so may he be righteous in his own eyes.
How one has longed for that sure confidence in
the petty failings of little living—the confidence
to believe that he can stand up and suffer for
principle! God has given all men who are out
here that opportunity—the supremest that can be
hoped for—so, in spite of exile, Christmas for
most of us will be a happy day. Does one see
more truly life’s worth on a battlefield? I often
ask myself that question. Is the contempt that is
hourly shown for life the real standard of life’s
worth? I shrug my shoulders at my own unanswerable
questions—all I know is that I move
daily with men who have everything to live for
who, nevertheless, are urged by an unconscious
magnanimity to die. I don’t think any of our
dead pity themselves—but they would have done
so if they had faltered in their choice. One lives
only from sunrise to sunrise, but there’s a more
real happiness in this brief living than I ever
knew before, because it is so exactingly worth
while.

Thank you again for your kindness.
Very sincerely yours,
C.D.

The suggestion that we might all meet in
London in January, 1917, was a hope rather
than an expectation. We received a cable from
France on Sunday, December 17th, 1916, and
left New York on December 30th. We were met
in London by the two sailor-sons, who were expecting
appointments at any moment, and Coningsby
arrived late in the evening of January
13th. He was unwell when he arrived, having
had a near touch of pneumonia. The day before
he left the front he had been in action, with
a temperature of 104. There were difficulties
about getting his leave at the exact time appointed,
but these he overcame by exchanging
leave with a brother-officer. He travelled from
the Front all night in a windowless train, and
at Calais was delayed by a draft of infantry
which he had to take over to England. The consequence
of this delay was that the meeting at
the railway station, of which he had so long
dreamed, did not come off. We spent a long
day, going from station to station, misled by imperfect
information as to the arrival of troop
trains. At Victoria Station we saw two thousand
troops arrive on leave, men caked with
trench-mud, but he was not among them. We
reluctantly returned to our hotel in the late afternoon
and gave up expecting him. There was all
the time a telegram at the hotel from him, giving
the exact place and time of his arrival, but it
was not delivered until it was too late to meet
him. He arrived at ten o’clock, and at the same
time his two brothers, who had been summoned
in the morning to Southampton, entered the hotel,
having been granted special leave to return to
London. A night’s rest did wonders for Coningsby,
and the next day his spirits were as high
as in the old days of joyous holiday. During
the next eight days we lived at a tense pitch of
excitement. We went to theatres, dined in restaurants,
met friends, and heard from his lips a
hundred details of his life which could not be
communicated in letters. We were all thrilled
by the darkened heroic London through which
we moved, the London which bore its sorrows
so proudly, and went about its daily life with
such silent courage. We visited old friends to
whom the war had brought irreparable bereavements,
but never once heard the voice of self-pity,
of murmur or complaint. To me it was
an incredible England; an England purged of all
weakness, stripped of flabbiness, regenerated by
sacrifice. I had dreamed of no such transformation
by anything I had read in American newspapers
and magazines. I think no one can
imagine the completeness of this rebirth of the
soul of England who has not dwelt, if only for
a few days, among its people.

Coningsby’s brief leave expired all too soon.
We saw him off from Folkestone, and while
we were saying good-bye to him, his two brothers
were on their way to their distant appointments
with the Royal Naval Motor Patrol in the North
of Scotland. We left Liverpool for New York
on January 27th, and while at sea heard of the
diplomatic break between America and Germany.
The news was received on board the S.S. St.
Paul with rejoicing. It was Sunday, and the religious
service on board concluded with the Star-Spangled
Banner.

XXXVI

December 28th, 1916.

Dearest All:

I’m writing you this letter because I expect
to-night is a busy-packing one with you.
The picture is in my mind of you all. How
splendid it is of you to come! I never thought
you would really, not even in my wildest dream
of optimism. There have been so many times
when I scarcely thought that I would ever see
you again—now the unexpected and hoped-for
happens. It’s ripping!

I’ve put in an application for special leave in
case the ordinary leave should be cut off. I think
I’m almost certain to arrive by the 11th. Won’t
we have a time? I wonder what we’ll want to
do most—sit quiet or go to theatres? The nine
days of freedom—the wonderful nine days—will
pass with most tragic quickness. But they’ll be
days to remember as long as life lasts.

Shall I see you standing on the station when
I puff into London—or will it be Folkestone
where we meet—or shall I arrive before you?
I somehow think it will be you who will meet me
at the barrier at Charing Cross, and we’ll taxi
through the darkened streets down the Strand,
and back to our privacy. How impossible it
sounds—like a vision of heart’s desire in the
night.

Far, far away I see the fine home-coming, like
a lamp burning in a dark night. I expect we
shall all go off our heads with joy and be madder
than ever. Who in the old London days would
have imagined such a nine days of happiness in
the old places as we are to have together.

God bless you, till we meet,

CON.

XXXVII

January 4th, 1917.

10.30 p.m.

MY DEAREST ONES:

This letter is written to welcome you to
England, but I may be with you when it is opened.
It was glorious news to hear that you were coming—I
was only playing a forlorn bluff when I
sent those cables. You’re on the sea at present
and should be half way over. Our last trip
over together you marvelled at the apparent indifference
of the soldiers on board, and now
you’re coming to meet one of your own fresh
from the Front. A change!

O what a nine days we’re going to have together—the
most wonderful that were ever spent.
I dream of them, tell myself tales about them,
live them over many times in imagination before
they are realised. Sometimes I’m going to
have no end of sleep, sometimes I’m going to
keep awake every second, sometimes I’m going
to sit quietly by a fire, and sometimes I’m going
to taxi all the time. I can’t fit your faces into
the picture—it seems too unbelievable that we
are to be together once again. To-day I’ve been
staging our meeting—if you arrive first, and then
if I arrive before you, and lastly if we both hit
London on the same day. You mustn’t expect
me to be a sane person. You’re three rippers to
do this—and I hope you’ll have an easy journey.
The only ghost is the last day, when the leave
train pulls out of Charing Cross. But we’ll do
that smiling, too; C’est la guerre.

Yours always and ever, CON.

XXXVIII

January 6th, 1917.

MY DEAR ONES:

I have just seen a brother officer aboard
the ex-London bus en route for Blighty. How
I wished I could have stepped on board that ex-London
perambulator to-night! “Pickerdilly
Cirkuss, ‘Ighbury, ‘Ighgate, Welsh ‘Arp—all the
wye.” O my, what a time I’ll have when I
meet you! I shall feel as though if anything
happens to me after my return you’ll be able to
understand so much more bravely. These blinkered
letters, with only writing and no touch of
live hands, convey so little. When we’ve had a
good time together and sat round the fire and
talked interminably you’ll be able to read so
much more between the lines of my future letters.
To-morrow you ought to land in England,
and to-morrow night you should sleep in London.
I am trying to swop my leave with another man,
otherwise it won’t come till the 15th. I am looking
forward every hour to those miraculous nine
days which we are to have together. You can’t
imagine with your vividest imagination the contrast
between nine days with you in London and
my days where I am now. A battalion went by
yesterday, marching into action, and its band was
playing I’ve a Sneakin’ Feelin’ in My Heart
That I Want to Settle Down. We all have that
sneaking feeling from time to time. I tell myself
wonderful stories in the early dark mornings and
become the architect of the most wonderful futures.

I’m coming to join you just as soon as I
know how—at the worst I’ll be in London on the
16th of this month.

Ever yours,

CON.

The following letters were written after Coningsby
had met his family in London.

XXXIX

January 24th, 1917.

MY DEAR ONES:

I have had a chance to write you sooner
than I expected, as I stopped the night where I
disembarked, and am catching my train to-day.

It’s strange to be back and under orders after
nine days’ freedom. Directly I landed I was detailed
to march a party—it was that that made me
lose my train—not that I objected, for I got one
more sleep between sheets. I picked up on the
boat in the casual way one does, with three other
officers, so on landing we made a party to dine
together, and had a very decent evening. I
wasn’t wanting to remember too much then, so
that was why I didn’t write letters.

What good times we have to look back on
and how much to be thankful for, that we met
altogether. Now we must look forward to the
summer and, perhaps, the end of the war. What
a mad joy will sweep across the world on the
day that peace is declared!

This visit will have made you feel that you
have a share in all that’s happening over here
and are as real a part of it as any of us. I’m
awfully proud of you for your courage.

Yours lovingly,

CON.

XL

January 26th, 1917.

MY VERY DEAR ONES:

Here I am back—my nine days’ leave a
dream. I got into our wagon-lines last night
after midnight, having had a cold ride along
frozen roads through white wintry country. I
was only half-expected, so my sleeping-bag hadn’t
been unpacked. I had to wake my batman and
tramp about a mile to the billet; by the time I
got there every one was asleep, so I spread out
my sleeping-sack and crept in very quietly. For
the few minutes before my eyes closed I pictured
London, the taxis, the gay parties, the mystery
of lights. I was roused this morning with
the news that I had to go up to the gun-position
at once. I stole just sufficient time to pick up a
part of my accumulated mail, then got on my
horse and set out. At the guns, I found that I
was due to report as liaison officer, so here I am
in the trenches again writing to you by candle-light.
How wonderfully we have bridged the
distance in spending those nine whole days together.
And now it is over, and I am back in the
trenches, and to-morrow you’re sailing for New
York.

I can’t tell you what the respite has meant to
me. There have been times when my whole past
life has seemed a myth and the future an endless
prospect of carrying on. Now I can distantly
hope that the old days will return.

When I was in London half my mind was at
the Front; now that I’m back in the trenches half
my mind is in London. I re-live our gay times
together; I go to cosy little dinners; I sit with
you in the stalls, listening to the music; then I
tumble off to sleep, and dream, and wake up to
find the dream a delusion. It’s a fine and
manly contrast, however, between the game one
plays out here and the fretful trivialities of
civilian life.

XLI

January 27th.

I got as far as this and then “something” happened.
Twenty-four hours have gone by and
once more it’s nearly midnight and I write to you
by candle-light. Since last night I’ve been with
these infantry boy-officers who are doing such
great work in such a careless spirit of jolliness.
Any softness which had crept into me during my
nine days of happiness has gone. I’m glad to be
out here and wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else
till the war is ended.

It’s a week to-day since we were at Charlie’s
Aunt—such a cheerful little party! I expect the
boys are doing their share of remembering too
somewhere on the sea at present. I know you
are, as you round the coast of Ireland and set
out for the Atlantic.

I’ve not been out of my clothes for three days
and I’ve another day to go yet. I brought my
haversack into the trenches with me; on opening
it I found that some kind hands had slipped
into it some clean socks and a bottle of Horlick’s
Malted Milk tablets.

The signallers in a near-by dug-out are singing
Keep the Home-Fires Burning Till the Boys
Come Home. That’s what we’re all doing,
isn’t it—you at your end and we at ours? The
brief few days of possessing myself are over and
once more stern duty lies ahead. But I thank God
for the chance I’ve had to see again those whom
I love, and to be able to tell them with my own
lips some of the bigness of our life at the Front.
No personal aims count beside the great privilege
which is ours to carry on until the war is over.

All my thoughts are with you—so many memories
of kindness. I keep on picturing things I
ought to have done—things I ought to have
told you. Always I can see, Oh, so vividly,
the two sailor brothers waving good-bye as
the train moved off through the London dusk,
and then that other and forlorner group of
three, standing outside the dock gates with
the sentry like the angel in Eden, turning them
back from happiness. With an extraordinary
aloofness I watched myself moving like a puppet
away from you whom I love most dearly
in all the world—going away as if going were a
thing so usual.

I’m asking myself again if there isn’t some
new fineness of spirit which will develop from
this war and survive it. In London, at a distance
from all this tragedy of courage, I felt that
I had slipped back to a lower plane; a kind of
flabbiness was creeping into my blood—the old
selfish fear of life and love of comfort. It’s odd
that out here, where the fear of death should
supplant the fear of life, one somehow rises into
a contempt for everything which is not bravest.
There’s no doubt that the call for sacrifice, and
perhaps the supreme sacrifice, can transform men
into a nobility of which they themselves are unconscious.
That’s the most splendid thing of
all, that they themselves are unaware of their
fineness.

I’m now waiting to be relieved and am hurrying
to finish this so that I may mail it as soon
as I get back to the battery. There’s a whole
sack of letters and parcels waiting for me there,
and I’m as eager to get to them as a kiddy to
inspect his Christmas stocking. I always undo
the string and wrappings with a kind of reverence,
trying to picture the dear kneeling figures
who did them up. In London I didn’t dare to
let myself go with you—I couldn’t say all that
was in my heart—it wouldn’t have been wise.
Don’t ever doubt that the tenderness was there.
Even though one is only a civilian in khaki, some
of the soldier’s sternness becomes second nature.

All the country is covered with snow—it’s brilliant
clear weather, more like America than
Europe. I’m feeling strong as a horse, ever so
much better than I felt when on leave. Life is
really tremendously worth living, in spite of the
war.

XLII

January 28th.

I’m back at the battery, sitting by a cosy fire.
I might be up at Kootenay by the look of my
surroundings. I’m in a shack with a really truly
floor, and a window looking out on moonlit whiteness.
If it wasn’t for the tapping of the distant
machine guns—tapping that always sounds to me
like the nailing up of coffins—I might be here
for pleasure. In imagination I can see your
great ship, with all its portholes aglare, ploughing
across the darkness to America. The dear
sailor brothers I can’t quite visualise; I can only
see them looking so upright and pale when we
said good-bye. It’s getting late and the fire’s
dying. I’m half asleep; I’ve not been out of my
clothes for three nights. I shall tell myself a
story of the end of the war and our next meeting—it’ll
last from the time that I creep into my
sack until I close my eyes. It’s a glorious life.

Yours very lovingly,

CON

XLIII

January 31st, 1917.

DEAR MR. AND MRS. M.:

It was extremely good of you to remember
me. I got back from leave in London on
the 26th and found the cigarettes waiting for
me. One hasn’t got an awful lot of pleasures
left, but smoking is one of them. I feel particularly
doggy when I open my case and find
my initials on them.

I expect you’ll have heard all the news of my
leave long before this reaches you. We had a
splendid time and the greatest of luck. My
sailor brothers were with me all but two days,
and my people were in England only a few days
before I arrived.

This is a queer adventure for a peaceable person
like myself—it blots out all the past and reduces
the future to a speck. One hardly hopes
that things will ever be different, but looks forward
to interminable years of carrying on. My
leave rather corrected that frame of mind; it came
as a surprise to be forced to realise that not all
the world was living under orders on woman less,
childless battlefields. But we don’t need
any pity—we manage our good times, and are
sorry for the men who aren’t here, for it’s a
wonderful thing to have been chosen to sacrifice
and perhaps to die that the world of the future
may be happier and kinder.

This letter is rather disjointed; I’m in charge
of the battery for the time, and messages keep
on coming in, and one has to rush out to give
the order to fire.

It’s an American night—snow-white and piercing,
with a frigid moon sailing quietly. I think
the quiet beauty of the sky is about the only
thing in Nature that we do not scar and destroy
with our fighting.

Good-bye, and thank you ever so much.

Yours very sincerely,

CONINGSBY DAWSON.

XLIV

February 1st, 1917.

11 p.m.

DEAR FATHER:

Your picture of the black days when no
letter comes from me sets me off scribbling to
you at this late hour. All to-day I’ve been having
a cold but amusing time at the O.P. (Forward
Observation Post). It seems brutal to say
it, but taking potshots at the enemy when they
present themselves is rather fun. When you
watch them scattering like ants before the shell
whose direction you have ordered, you somehow
forget to think of them as individuals, any more
than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs that will
be left motherless. You watch your victims
through your glasses as God might watch his
mad universe. Your skill in directing fire makes
you what in peace times would be called a murderer.
Curious! You’re glad, and yet at close
quarters only in hot blood would you hurt a man.

I’d been back for a little over an hour when
I had to go forward again to guide in some guns.
The country was dazzlingly white in the moonlight.
As far as eye could see every yard was
an old battlefield; beneath the soft white fleece
of snow lay countless unburied bodies. Like
frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the
horizon, Hun lights were shooting up and drifting
across our front. Tap-tap-tappity went the machine-guns;
whoo-oo went the heavies, and they
always stamp like angry bulls. I had to come
back by myself across the heroic corruption which
the snow had covered. All the way I asked myself
why was I not frightened. What has happened
to me? Ghosts should walk here if anywhere.
Moreover, I know that I shall be frightened
again when the war is ended. Do you remember
how you once offered me money to walk
through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I
wouldn’t? I wouldn’t if you offered it to me
now. You remember Meredith’s lines in “The
Woods of Westermain”:

“All the eyeballs under hoods
Shroud you in their glare;
Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare.”

Maybe what re-creates one for the moment is the
British officer’s uniform, and even more the fact
that you are not asked, but expected, to do your
duty. So I came back quite unruffled across battered
trenches and silent mounds to write this
letter to you.

My dear father, I’m over thirty, and yet just
as much a little boy as ever. I still feel overwhelmingly
dependent on your good opinion and
love. I’m glad that they are black days when
you have no letters from me. I love to think
of the rush to the door when the postman rings
and the excited shouting up the stairs, “Quick,
one from Con.”

February 2nd.

You see by the writing how tired I was when
I reached this point. It’s nearly twenty-four
hours later and again night. The gramophone is
playing an air from La Tosca to which the guns
beat out a bass accompaniment. I close my eyes
and picture the many times I have heard the
(probably) German orchestras of Broadway Joy
Palaces play that same music. How incongruous
that I should be listening to it here and under
these circumstances! It must have been
listened to so often by gay crowds in the beauty
places of the world. A romantic picture grows
up in my mind of a blue night, the laughter of
youth in evening dress, lamps twinkling through
trees, far off the velvety shadow of water and
mountains, and as a voice to it all, that air from
La Tosca. I can believe that the silent people
near by raise themselves up in their snow-beds
to listen, each one recalling some ecstatic moment
before the dream of life was shattered.

There’s a picture in the Pantheon at Paris, I
remember; I believe it’s called To Glory. One
sees all the armies of the ages charging out of
the middle distance with Death riding at their
head. The only glory that I have discovered in
this war is in men’s hearts—it’s not external.
Were one to paint the spirit of this war he would
depict a mud landscape, blasted trees, an iron sky;
wading through the slush and shell-holes would
come a file of bowed figures, more like outcasts
from the Embankment than soldiers. They’re
loaded down like pack animals, their shoulders
are rounded, they’re wearied to death, but they
go on and go on. There’s no “To Glory” about
what we’re doing out here; there’s no flash of
swords or splendour of uniforms. There are
only very tired men determined to carry on. The
war will be won by tired men who could never
again pass an insurance test, a mob of broken
counter-jumpers, ragged ex-plumbers and quite
unheroic persons. We’re civilians in khaki, but
because of the ideals for which we fight we’ve
managed to acquire soldiers’ hearts.

My flow of thought was interrupted by a burst
of song in which I was compelled to join. We’re
all writing letters around one candle; suddenly
the O.C. looked up and began, God Be With
You Till We Meet Again. We sang it in parts.
It was in Southport, when I was about nine years
old, that I first heard that sung. You had gone
for your first trip to America, leaving a very
lonely family behind you. We children were
scared to death that you’d be drowned. One evening,
coming back from a walk on the sand-hills,
we heard voices singing in a garden, God Be
With You Till We Meet Again. The words and
the soft dusk, and the vague figures in the English
summer garden, seemed to typify the terror of
all partings. We’ve said good-bye so often since,
and God has been with us. I don’t think any
parting was more hard than our last at the prosaic
dock-gates with the cold wind of duty blowing,
and the sentry barring your entrance, and
your path leading back to America while mine
led on to France. But you three were regular
soldiers—just as much soldiers as we chaps who
were embarking. One talks of our armies in
the field, but there are the other armies, millions
strong, of mothers and fathers and sisters,
who keep their eyes dry, treasure muddy letters
beneath their pillows, offer up prayers and wait,
wait, wait so eternally for God to open another
door.

To-morrow I again go forward, which means
rising early and taking a long plod through the
snows; that’s one reason for not writing any
more, and another is that our one poor candle
is literally on its last legs.

Your poem, written years ago when the poor
were marching in London, is often in my mind:

“Yesterday and to-day
Have been heavy with labour and sorrow;
I should faint if I did not see
The day that is after to-morrow.”

And there’s that last verse which prophesied utterly
the spirit in which we men at the Front are
fighting to-day:

“And for me, with spirit elate
The mire and the fog I press thorough,
For Heaven shines under the cloud
Of the day that is after to-morrow.”

We civilians who have been taught so long to
love our enemies and do good to them who hate
us—much too long ever to make professional
soldiers—are watching with our hearts in our
eyes for that day which conies after to-morrow.
Meanwhile we plod on determinedly, hoping for
the hidden glory.

Yours very lovingly,

Con.

XLV

February 3rd, 1917.

Dear Misses W.:

You were very kind to remember me at
Christmas. Seventeen was read with all kinds
of gusto by all my brother officers. It’s still being
borrowed.

I’ve been back from leave a few days now and
am settling back to business again. It was a
trifle hard after over-eating and undersleeping
myself for nine days, and riding everywhere with
my feet up in taxis. I was the wildest little boy.
Here it’s snowy and bitter. We wear scarves
round our ears to keep the frost away and dream
of fires a mile high. All I ask, when the war is
ended, is to be allowed to sit asleep in a big armchair
and to be left there absolutely quiet. Sleep,
which we crave so much at times, is only death
done up in sample bottles. Perhaps some of
these very weary men who strew our battlefields
are glad to lie at last at endless leisure.

Good-bye, and thank you.

Yours very sincerely,

Con.

XLVI

February 4th, 1917.

My Dearest Mother:

Somewhere in the distance I can hear a
piano going and men’s voices singing A Perfect
Day. It’s queer how music creates a world
for you in which you are not, and makes you
dreamy. I’ve been sitting by a fire and thinking
of all the happy times when the total of desire
seemed almost within one’s grasp. It never
is—one always, always misses it and has to rub
the dust from the eyes, recover one’s breath and
set out on the search afresh. I suppose when
you grow very old you learn the lesson of sitting
quiet, and the heart stops beating and the total
of desire comes to you. And yet I can remember
so many happy days, when I was a child in
the summer and later at Kootenay. One almost
thought he had caught the secret of carrying
heaven in his heart.

By the time this reaches you I’ll be in the line
again, but for the present I’m undergoing a special
course of training. You can’t hear the most
distant sound of guns, and if it wasn’t for the
pressure of study, similar to that at Kingston,
one would be very rested.

Sunday of all days is the one when I remember
you most. You’re just sitting down to mid-day
dinner,—I’ve made the calculation for difference
of time. You’re probably saying how
less than a month ago we were in London. That
doesn’t sound true even when I write it. I wonder
how your old familiar surroundings strike
you. It’s terrible to come down from the mountain
heights of a great elation like our ten days
in London. I often think of that with regard to
myself when the war is ended. There’ll be a
sense of dissatisfaction when the old lost comforts
are regained. There’ll be a sense of lowered
manhood. The stupendous terrors of Armageddon
demand less courage than the uneventful
terror of the daily commonplace. There’s
something splendid and exhilarating in going forward
among bursting shells—we, who have done
all that, know that when the guns have ceased to
roar our blood will grow more sluggish and we’ll
never be such men again. Instead of getting up
in the morning and hearing your O.C. say,
“You’ll run a line into trench so-and-so to-day
and shoot up such-and-such Hun wire,” you’ll
hear necessity saying, “You’ll work from breakfast
to dinner and earn your daily bread. And
you’ll do it to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
world without end. Amen.” They
never put that forever and forever part into their
commands out here, because the Amen for any
one of us may be only a few hours away. But
the big immediate thing is so much easier to do
than the prosaic carrying on without anxiety—which
is your game. I begin to understand what
you have had to suffer now that R. and E.
are really at war too. I get awfully anxious
about them. I never knew before that either of
them owned so much of my heart. I get furious
when I remember that they might get hurt.
I’ve heard of a Canadian who joined when he
learnt that his best friend had been murdered
by Hun bayonets. He came to get his own back
and was the most reckless man in his battalion.
I can understand his temper now. We’re all of
us in danger of slipping back into the worship
of Thor.

I’ll write as often as I can while here, but I
don’t get much time—so you’ll understand. It’s
the long nights when one sits up to take the firing
in action that give one the chance to be a decent
correspondent.

My birthday comes round soon, doesn’t it?
Good heavens, how ancient I’m getting and without
any “grow old along with me” consolation.
Well, to grow old is all in the job of living.

Good-bye, and God bless you all.

Yours ever,

Con.

XLVII

February 4th, 1917.

Dear Mr. B.:

I have been intending to write to you for
a very long time, but as most of one’s writing
is done when one ought to be asleep, and sleep
next to eating is one of our few remaining pleasures,
my intended letter has remained in my head
up to now. On returning from a nine days’
leave to London the other day, however, I found
two letters from you awaiting me and was reproached
into effort.

War’s a queer game—not at all what one’s
civilian mind imagined; it’s far more horrible and
less exciting. The horrors which the civilian
mind dreads most are mutilation and death. Out
here we rarely think about them; the thing which
wears on one most and calls out his gravest courage
is the endless sequence of physical discomfort.
Not to be able to wash, not to be able to
sleep, to have to be wet and cold for long periods
at a stretch, to find mud on your person, in your
food, to have to stand in mud, see mud, sleep in
mud and to continue to smile—that’s what tests
courage. Our chaps are splendid. They’re not
the hair-brained idiots that some war-correspondents
depict from day to day. They’re perfectly
sane people who know to a fraction what they’re
up against, but who carry on with a grim good-nature
and a determination to win with a smile.
I never before appreciated as I do to-day the
latent capacity for big-hearted endurance that is
in the heart of every man. Here are apparently
quite ordinary chaps—chaps who washed, liked
theatres, loved kiddies and sweethearts, had a
zest for life—they’re bankrupt of all pleasures
except the supreme pleasure of knowing that
they’re doing the ordinary and finest thing of
which they are capable. There are millions to
whom the mere consciousness of doing their duty
has brought an heretofore unexperienced peace
of mind. For myself I was never happier than
I am at present; there’s a novel zip added to life
by the daily risks and the knowledge that at last
you’re doing something into which no trace of
selfishness enters. One can only die once; the
chief concern that matters is how and not when
you die. I don’t pity the weary men who have
attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our
shell-furrowed battles; they “went West” in their
supreme moment. The men I pity are those who
could not hear the call of duty and whose consciences
will grow more flabby every day. With
the brutal roar of the first Prussian gun the
cry came to the civilised world, “Follow thou
me,” just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went
to their Calvary singing Tipperary, rubbish,
rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal to
that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphitheatre.
“Greater love hath no man than this,
that he lay down his life for his friend.” Our
chaps are doing that consciously, willingly, almost
without bitterness towards their enemies;
for the rest it doesn’t matter whether they sing
hymns or ragtime. They’ve followed their
ideal—freedom—and died for it. A former age
expressed itself in Gregorian chants; ours, no less
sincerely, disguises its feelings in ragtime.

Since September I have been less than a month
out of action. The game doesn’t pall as time
goes on—it fascinates. We’ve got to win so that
men may never again be tortured by the ingenious
inquisition of modern warfare. The winning of
the war becomes a personal affair to the chaps
who are fighting. The world which sits behind
the lines, buys extra specials of the daily papers
and eats three square meals a day, will never
know what this other world has endured for its
safety, for no man of this other world will have
the vocabulary in which to tell. But don’t for
a moment mistake me—we’re grimly happy.

What a serial I’ll write for you if I emerge
from this turmoil! Thank God, my outlook is
all altered. I don’t want to live any longer—only
to live well.

Good-bye and good luck.

Yours,

Coningsby Dawson.

XLVIII

February 5th, 1917.

My Dearest Mother:

Aren’t the papers good reading now-a-days
with nothing to record but success? It
gives us hope that at last, anyway before the year
is out, the war must end. As you know, I am at
the artillery school back of the lines for a month,
taking an extra course. I have been meeting a
great many young officers from all over the world
and have listened to them discussing their program
for when peace is declared. Very few of
them have any plans or prospects. Most of them
had just started on some course of professional
training to which they won’t have the energy to
go back after a two years’ interruption. The
question one asks is how will all these men be reabsorbed
into civilian life. I’m afraid the result
will be a vast host of men with promising pasts
and highly uncertain futures. We shall be a holiday
world without an income. I’m afraid the
hero-worship attitude will soon change to impatience
when the soldiers beat their swords into
ploughshares and then confess that they have
never been taught to plough. That’s where I
shall score—by beating my sword into a pen.
But what to write about—! Everything will
seem so little and inconsequential after seeing
armies marching to mud and death, and people
will soon get tired of hearing about that. It
seems as though war does to the individual what
it does to the landscapes it attacks—obliterates
everything personal and characteristic. A valley,
when a battle has done with it, is nothing but
earth—exactly what it was when God said, “Let
there be Light;” a man just something with a
mind purged of the past and ready to observe
afresh. I question whether a return to old
environments will ever restore to us the whole of
our old tastes and affections. War is, I think,
utterly destructive. It doesn’t even create courage—it
only finds it in the soul of a man. And
yet there is one quality which will survive the
war and help us to face the temptations of peace—that
same courage which most of us have unconsciously
discovered out here.

Well, my dear, I have little news—at least,
none that I can tell. I’m just about recovered
from an attack of “flu.” I want to get thoroughly
rid of it before I go back to my battery. I hope
you all keep well. God bless you all.

Yours ever,

Con.

XLIX

February 6th, 1917.

My Very Dear M.:

I read in to-day’s paper that U.S.A.
threatens to come over and help us. I wish
she would. The very thought of the possibility
fills me with joy. I’ve been light-headed all day.
It would be so ripping to live among people,
when the war is ended, of whom you need not
be ashamed. Somewhere deep down in my heart
I’ve felt a sadness ever since I’ve been out here,
at America’s lack of gallantry—it’s so easy to
find excuses for not climbing to Calvary; sacrifice
was always too noble to be sensible. I
would like to see the country of our adoption become
splendidly irrational even at this eleventh
hour in the game; it would redeem her in the
world’s eyes. She doesn’t know what she’s
losing. From these carcase-strewn fields of
khaki there’s a cleansing wind blowing for the
nations that have died. Though there was only
one Englishman left to carry on the race when
this war is victoriously ended, I would give more
for the future of England than for the future of
America with her ninety millions whose sluggish
blood was not stirred by the call of duty. It’s
bigness of soul that makes nations great and not
population. Money, comfort, limousines and
ragtime are not the requisites of men when
heroes are dying. I hate the thought of Fifth
Avenue, with its pretty faces, its fashions, its
smiling frivolity. America as a great nation will
die, as all coward civilisations have died, unless
she accepts the stigmata of sacrifice, which a
divine opportunity again offers her.

If it were but possible to show those ninety
millions one battlefield with its sprawling dead,
its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self, I
think then—no, they wouldn’t be afraid. Fear
isn’t the emotion one feels—they would
experience the shame of living when so many have
shed their youth freely. This war is a prolonged
moment of exultation for most of us—we
are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes.
To lay down one’s life for one’s friend once
seemed impossible. All that is altered. We lay
down our lives that the future generations may
be good and kind, and so we can contemplate
oblivion with quiet eyes. Nothing that is noblest
that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the
simplest men out here to-day. They may die
childless, but their example will father the imagination
of all the coming ages. These men, in
the noble indignation of a great ideal, face a
worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics
ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like
moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured.
And again other men step forward to
take their places well knowing what will be their
fate. Bodies may die, but the spirit of England
grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its
way. The battened souls of America will die and
be buried. I believe the decision of the next
few days will prove to be the crisis in America’s
nationhood. If she refuses the pain which will
save her, the cancer of self-despising will rob her
of her life.

This feeling is strong with us. It’s past midnight,
but I could write of nothing else to-night.

God bless you.

Yours ever,

Con.