You don’t know, can’t guess, how letters from home buck me up and keep the lamp of my ideals still burning. There are moments when the mere mechanical side of warfare fills one’s mind with an infinite depression. One sees men doing splendid acts, day in day out, like automatons animated by the spring of duty. One almost forgets that there is any human element of choice in the matter, or a difference between fighting and fighting well. When your pages come, I remember—remember that just such affections and human ties bind the hearts of all who are out here to life. I begin to see my chaps as personalities again and not as only soldiers. Outside the chaps are singing “O my, I don’t want to die; I want to go home.” Now they’ve changed to “Take me Over to Blighty.” LI France June 8, 1918 Last night I saw the old lady who nursed me up so that I was fit to come and meet you in London when you all came in 1917 from America. Seeing her again brought back all sorts of memories of the depressions and exaltations of other days. I think I have been both sadder and more happy since the war began than in all the other years of my life. And I used to write about the world not as it is, but about the world as I would have made it, had I been God. Now I’m trying to see things as they are, with the inevitable God shining through them. Here, at the Front, God is everywhere apparent—but not the cathedral God I had imagined—not the majestic God with sublime uplifted eyes which know nothing of finite terror. The God of the Front has brave eyes which have suffered; His mouth is a human mouth, which has known the pain of parting and kisses; His hands are roughened and burnt and bloody; there is the stoop of agony in His shoulders and the hint of a valiant jest in His splendid bearing of defiance. He is one of us. He is us entirely. He is no longer remote and eternal. For us He has again become flesh—He is our comrade; He is the man upon our left and our right hand, who goes into battle with us; He is our dead. We cannot escape Him; the pettinesses of our sins are forgotten in the resemblance of our neighbours to His majesty. Nowadays I cannot think of the poet’s Christ, wandering through Galilean lilies in a woman’s robes. It’s His manly death, His white timeless body on the Cross that I remember. Without Calvary all His words would have been unconvincing and He Himself a dreamer’s fancy. It was only on the Cross that Christ became flesh—all that went before is like a lovely legend gradually materializing in the atmosphere of tragedy. God save us from being always happy. It’s the chance of being always happy that I dread most after the war. There’s a terrible corpulence about happiness which borders very closely on physical grossness. To strive and keep on striving—that is what I want for the world when war is ended, and to have to pay with sacrifice for each advance. I don’t think any of us who come back