That’s an answer to his question.

And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.  Well—­there’s a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn’t believe in if I told her—­it’s the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was absolutely right.  You aren’t sold.  It’s more than anything you could have imagined.  I’m not speaking only for myself.

There’s just one beastly sensation when you’re half way between your parapet and theirs—­other fellows say they’ve felt it too—­when you’re afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there.  But it doesn’t.  It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together.  You needn’t be sorry for us.  It’s waste of pity.

I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren’t sorry for us.  But I’m not so sure of Michael and Mother.—­Always your loving,

     NICKY.

               May, 1915. 
          B.E.F., FRANCE

My Dear Mick,—­It’s awfully decent of you to write so often when you loathe writing, especially about things that bore you.  But you needn’t do that.  We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or less; and I honestly don’t care a damn what Asquith is saying or what Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe’s motives are.  Personally, I should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country.  Looks like it.  But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us enough shells out in time we shan’t worry about his motives.  Anyhow that sort of thing isn’t in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much better than you, if you don’t mind my saying so.

What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last sweet thing Dad said to Mother—­I’d give a day’s rest in my billet for one of his worst jokes.  And I like to hear about Morrie going on the bust again, too—­it sounds so peaceful.  Only if it really is anxiety about me that makes him do it, I wish he’d leave off thinking about me, poor old thing.

More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she’s looking and what she’s feeling; you’ll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell you things she won’t tell the others.  That’s why I’m glad you’re there and not here.

And as for that—­why go on worrying?  I do know how you feel about it.  I think I always did, in a way.  I never thought you were a “putrid Pacifist.”  Your mind’s all right.  You say the War takes me like religion; perhaps it does; I don’t know enough about religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot.  And when you say it doesn’t take you that way, that you haven’t “got” it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of mind.  Of course, I know it isn’t funk.  If you’d happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you’d have been in at the start, before me.