It’s about two years to-day since I landed in England for the first time in khaki; since then how one has changed! I can scarcely recognise myself at all. It’s difficult to believe that I’m the same person. Without exaggeration, the world has become to me a much jollier place because of this martial experience. I don’t know how it is with you, but my heart has grown wings. One has changed in so many ways—the things that once caused panic, he now welcomes. Nothing gives us more joy than the news that we’re to be shoved into a great offensive. It’s for each of us as though we had been invited to our own wedding. Danger, which we used to dodge, now allures us. I read a very true article the other day on the things which we have lost through the war. We have lost our youth, many of us. We have foregone so many glorious springs—all the seasons have sunk their tones into the sombre brown-grey mud of the past four years. We have lost all our festivals of affection and emotion. Sundays, Christmases, Easters—they are all the same as other days—so many hours useful only for the further killing of men. “You will say,” writes my author, “that the war, after all, will not last for ever, and that the man and woman of average longevity will live through threescore-and-ten years of God’s wonderful springs. That to a very minor extent is true. The war will not last for ever; but the memory of it, the suffering of it, the incalculable waste of it, will last for all that remains of our lives—which is 'for ever,’ after all, so far as you and I are concerned.” He goes on to say that there are years and years—but the years in which a man and woman may know that they are alive are few—the years of love and of beauty. I agree with all this writer says; his words voice an ache that is always in our hearts. But he forgets—life, love, youth and even beauty are not everything. The animals have them. What we have gained is a new standard of worth, which we have won at the expense of our bodies. To me that outweighs all that we have lost. I spoke to you in a previous letter of the divine discontent which goads us on, so that when we have attained a standard of which we never thought ourselves capable, we envy a new and nobler goal, and commence to race towards it. In one of Q.’. books I came across a verse which expresses this exactly: “Oh that I were where I would be! Then would I be where I am not. But where I am there I must be; And where I would be, I can not.” Discontented, ungrateful creatures we are! And yet there is nobility in our discontent. By the way, over the doorway of my O.P. is chalked this sound advice—“Do unto Fritzie as he doth unto you. But do it first.” LXVII France August 13, 1918