Well—­I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like.  It’s been like that every time (except that I’ve got over the queer funky feeling half-way through).  It’ll be like that again next time, I know.  Because now I’ve tested it.  And, Ronny—­I couldn’t tell Dorothy this, because she’d think it was all rot—­but when you’re up first out of the trench and stand alone on the parapet, it’s absolute happiness.  And the charge is—­well, it’s simply heaven.  It’s as if you’d never really lived till then; I certainly hadn’t, not up to the top-notch, barring those three days we had together.

That’s why—­this part’s mostly for Michael—­there’s something rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he’s trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness.  If he thinks that’s all there is in it, he doesn’t know much about war, or love either.  Though I’m bound to say there’s a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing.  He says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same as I do; but that it’s simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the top—­a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed, he called it.  He’s always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had been drunk.

And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there’s nothing in it but “a ration of rum.”  Can’t be that in my case because I always give mine to a funny chap who knows he’s going to have collywobbles as soon as he gets out into the open.

But that isn’t a bit what I mean.  They’re all wrong about it, because they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed. That—­when you realize it—­well, it’s like the thing you told me about that you said you thought must be God because it’s so real.  I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.  You’re bang up against reality—­you’re going clean into it—­and the sense of it’s exquisite.  Of course, while one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill and doing its best to keep on this side reality.  But I’ve been near enough to the other side to know.  And I wish Michael’s friend would come out and see what it’s like for himself.  Or, better still, Mick. He’d write a poem about it that would make you sit up.  It’s a sin that I should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can’t do anything with it.

Love to all of them and to your darling self.—­Always your loving,

     NICKY.

P.S.-I wish you’d try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and Mother.  It would save them half the misery they’re probably going through.

* * * * *

The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden, weeding the delphinium border.

It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there.  Anthony was digging in the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and fruit for the hospital.  Every now and then she came through the open door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.