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: