Thank God, we’ve got time to forget it. Whenever I start trying to explain to you the psychology of our fighting-men I’m always conscious that, even while I’m telling you the absolute truth, with the same words I’m creating a wrong impression. Fighting-men aren’t magnificent most of the time; they’re not idealists; they’re not heroic. Very often they’re petty and cynical and cowards. They’re only magnificent and idealistic and heroic in the decision that brought them here, and in the last supreme moment when they bring their decision to fulfilment. In a letter I received from Paris the other day the puzzle of the modern soldier was very well expressed. “I don’t believe,” it said, “I will ever get used to the courage of the men who go on and on with this terrible game. I’m thinking more now of the French and the British soldiers, who are mended up only to go at it again. I never can get used to it or take it as a matter of course. When I think for a minute how it hurts to have a tooth filled, I wonder that all the armies of the world don’t get up and run away from each other of one accord—every one who isn’t a hero or a fool, that’s to say.” When I think over the problem calmly I have the same wonder. The problem was so neatly expressed that I read the passage out to the mess. They stopped in a round of poker to listen. “Well, which are we,” I asked; “heroes or fools?” “Fools,” they said unanimously, and then went on playing their hands again. They’re right; we are fools. We’re certainly not heroes. We’re fools for a kind of kingdom of heaven’s sake—but we don’t act like the heaven part of it any more than we talk about our patriotism. Any mention of either would make us shudder. I wonder what motive brought the heathen Chinee to the Western Front. I’ve been told that he came that he might buy food for his family, because there’s a famine in China. Maybe. His bronze face stares up into ours from out the green-gold of the standing wheat—stares up into ours with the inscrutable gaze of an age-old Buddha. He’s the one human being on the Western Front who neither by acts nor words explains his nobility. Nobility there must have been to induce him to come; no reasoning creature would have jeopardized his body out of lust. Last night I rode beneath a full white moon for miles through the standing crops. I only struck a road to cross it and say good-bye to it—then on and on with the soft swish of the swelling stalks against my stirrups. Shall we recall our old panics and delights if we live to reach normality again? Will normality satisfy? Shall we be content to know that all the hoard of the future years is ours? In a word, shall we ever again desire to be safe? Questions which none of us can answer! LVI France June 27, 1918