The Army is a nursery organization, full of annoying pomposities and amusing class distinctions. Just at present we’re being pestered with continual inspections, when each battery tries to invent some new trick for making itself look smarter. Soldiers, on such occasions, are like a lot of old women at a spring cleaning. The men much prefer killing Boches to being inspected. Burnishing steel, chasing all over the country to buy Brasso, spending fortunes on polish for the harness all seem such a fruitless waste of time when the Huns are hammering our line. But, of course, cleanliness has a moral effect on men who have been long under shell-fire. This is a discursive sort of letter, and doesn’t contain much real news. It’s just for remembrance. XLIX France June 4, 1918 I’ve just left the gramophone shrilly declaring that “When he fancies he is past love, it is then he meets his last love and he loves her as he never loved before.” London comes with us to the Front. We hum the tunes of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, and we scheme such splendid times for our return. Leave has opened up again, but by a careful calculation I have discovered that it will take twenty-one years four months and three days till my turn comes round at the present rate of allotments. Some New York papers have just arrived and an exceedingly ancient cake, but no letters. In the midst of a great offensive it is wonderful that anything gets to us at all. We’re as far away from you both in reality and imagination as though we lived in a different world. Our standards of conduct, normality, right living are not your standards—our hopes and fears are all different. Again, as when I first came to the Front, everything civilian seems a tale I have read about. I cannot believe that that person who was in New York last October was really myself. I rather wonder at him and at his capacity for writing about the commonplace events of the present life. Now I couldn’t write a line about the war if my life depended on it. I see nothing in perspective except the endless path of duty which leads on ahead as each day introduces itself. To what goal that path leads I sometimes try to guess—to something wonderful and unforeseen, I have no doubt.