You can walk for miles where we are without ever being seen, if you follow the various systems of Hun and British trenches, for we’re plumb in the heart of an old battlefield. The only landmarks left to guide one are the craters as big as churches—records of mines that have been sprung—and little rows of lonely graves. At night when the moon is up, this country creates the curious ghostly illusion of being an endless alkali desert, beaten into billows by the wind. The shells go shrieking over it and wreaths of mist wander here and there like phantoms. Destruction can create a terrible pretence and caricature of beauty. I wish you might visit such a place just once so as to get an idea of where our lives are spent. Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different. We’re having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we’re as amused by the Hun as ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him. That is the attitude of every British soldier that I’ve met. We’re as happy and unconcerned as children. There’s one chap here who’s typical of this spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event. He’s the raiding officer of a certain battalion, and is known as “Battling Brown”—though Brown is not his real name. He has a little company of his own, consisting of seventy men. He’s been in over a hundred raids on the Hun Front line and has only had two of his men killed in a year. A short while ago he went across with his raiders and captured three Germans; on the return journey across No Man’s Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them. He led his men safely back to our lines and then set out again alone on a private excursion into the Boche territory. By dawn he once more returned, bringing back four prisoners single-handed. You might picture such a man as a kind of Hercules, but he isn’t. He’s thin, and tall, and fair, and high strung. His age, I should guess, is about twenty-two.