I have spoken several times to you about the test of war; how it acknowledges one chief virtue—courage. A man may be a poet, painter, may speak with the tongue of angels; but, if he has not courage, he is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The other day I was accidentally the witness to the promulgation of a court-martial. The man was an officer; he had been sentenced to be shot, but the order had been changed to cashiering. There, in the sunlight, all his brother officers were drawn up at attention. Across the fields the men whom he had commanded were playing baseball. He was led out bareheaded. The sentence and the crime for which he had been sentenced were read aloud to him in an unsteady voice. When that was ended, an officer stepped forward and stripped the buttons and the badges of rank from his uniform. It was like a funeral at which his honour was buried. Under an escort, he was given “Right turn,” and marched away to meet the balance of life that remained. In peace times he’d have been reckoned a decent-looking chap, a little smart, but handsome—the kind of fellow of whom some mother must have been proud and whom probably at least one girl loved. A tall chap, too—six foot at least. I see him standing in the strong sunlight, white-faced and dumb—better dead—despised. His fate was the fate which many of us feared before we put on khaki when the call first came. We had feared that we might not be able to stand the test and might be shot behind the lines. How and why we can stand it we ourselves cannot say. It was all a gamble at the start. Here was one man who had failed. The arithmetic of his spiritual values was at fault: he had chosen bitter life when death would have been splendid. This must all sound very strange to you in your environment, where your honour and life are safe. Perhaps I should not intrude such scenes upon you. LX France July 15, 1918 The mail has just come up to us. The runner stuck his head into the hole in the trench where I live and shoved in a pile of letters. “How many for me?” I asked. “All of them,” he said. I’m all alone at the battery, the major having gone forward to reconnoitre a position and all the other subalterns being away on duties—so I’ve had a quiet time browsing through my correspondence. A Hun cat sits at the top of the dug-out across the trench and blinks at me. We found him on the position. He’s fat and sleek and plausible-looking. I can’t get it out of my mind that he’s kept up his strength by battening on the corpses of his former owners. Between the guns there are two graves; one to an unknown British and the other to an unknown German soldier.