"MY DEAR GIRL,--In a couple of hours we are going over the parapet to reach the German lines or gain oblivion--or worse. All around me the men I have worked with, slept with, fought with, are writing to, or thinking of, some loved one at home. I do not know whether the love you once felt for me has died or not, but it was once strong enough to hurt me as no one had ever done before--to tear my soul out to where I could see its rottenness with my own eyes. I could not live with myself after that, and as you must have heard, for I believe it was a drawing-room jest for some time, I joined a battalion composed almost entirely of men from the factories, the workshops, and the streets. "It was partly a spirit of bravado made me do it, and partly a desire to wrestle with truth. I cannot say how hard it was at first to endure their company, their incessant, meaningless profanity. I hated every one of them. To salute an officer in the street caused me such humiliation that I thought of desertion a dozen times. From my contempt of my fellow-soldiers to an understanding of their nobility has been a hard, cruel road to travel; but I have traveled it, and I think that somewhere on the road there is a cross whereon my pride was crucified. Vera, my prayer is no longer that of the Pharisee, but of the Publican. I was offered a commission; I was urged to join the signalers or the machine-gun section, because there I should find men more after my own stamp; but I refused--the memory of your words made me stick with the men I started with. "I have found them crude, uneducated, unambitious, but true as steel, and asking no better reward for their heroism than that their 'missus and kids' will be looked after at home. I tell you, Vera, that when the war is over we shall have to realize that it is not only the consumptive and the imbecile that deserve care and thought. There is a grandeur, a manhood, in the ordinary, unlovely, unkempt man of the streets that our civilization has failed to bring out, but war has done it. So much has war given to us; so much has peace failed to give. "Life has become a riddle to me, still fascinating, but fascinatingly puzzling. Perhaps I shall find the answer in No Man's Land. "Good-bye, dear girl. Don't think from the tone of my letter that I have forgotten how to smile (this is where real humor is found, for humor was always a twin to tragedy). But I am forgetting how to scoff. I suppose, though, that I haven't changed beyond recognition, for I believe behind my back I am called 'The Duke.' "Like my comrades, I have written to a loved one at home. "I trust, Vera, that it is _au revoir_. "DENNIS. "D. O. Montague, Pte. No. 67,895, "Brindle's Battalion, C.E.F." IX