Derek, dear, I've been moved as you see from No. 13. I'm with the men now, and though I hated going at first--yet, now, I think I almost prefer it. With the officers there must always be a little constraint--at least, I have never been able to get rid of the feeling. Perhaps with more experience it would vanish _je ne sais pas_ . . . but with the men it's never there. They're just children, Derek, just dear helpless kiddies; and so wonderfully grateful for any little thing one does. Never a whimper; never the slightest impatience. . . . they're just wonderful. One expects it from the officers; but somehow it strikes one with a feeling almost of surprise when one meets it in the men. There's one of them, a boy of eighteen, with both his legs blown off above the knee. He just lies there silently, trying to understand. He never worries or frets--but there's a look in his eyes--a puzzled, questioning look sometimes--which asks as clearly as if he spoke--"Why has this thing happened to _me_?" He comes from a little Devonshire fishing village, he tells me; and until the war he'd never been away from it! Can you imagine the pitiful, chaotic, helplessness in his mind? Oh! doesn't it all seem too insensately brutal? . . . It's not even as if there was any sport in it; it's all so utterly ugly and bestial. . . . One feels so helpless, so bewildered, and the look in some of their eyes makes one want to scream, with the horror of it. . . . But, old man, the object of this letter is not to inflict on you my ideas on war. It is in a sense a continuation, and a development, of our talk on the beach at Paris Plage. I have been thinking a good deal lately about that conversation, and now that I have almost definitely made up my mind as to what I propose to do myself after the war, I consider it only fair to let you know. I said to you then that perhaps my job might only be to help you to fulfil your own destiny, and nothing which I have decided since alters that in any way. If you still want me after the war--if we find that neither of us has made a mistake--I can still help you, Derek, I hope. But, my dear, it won't be quite a passive help, if you understand what I mean. I've got to be up and doing myself--actively; to be merely any man's echo--his complement--however much I loved him, would not be enough. I've come to that, you see. And so I've decided--not quite definitely as I said, but almost so--to read for Medicine. I'm a little old, perhaps, though I'm only twenty-four: but these years in France have at any rate not been wasted. The question of money does not come in luckily, and the work attracts me immensely. Somehow I feel that I might be helping to repair a tiny bit of the hideous destruction and mutilation which we're suffering from now.