She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought:  “Has he forgotten, so soon?” And he remembered.

“I can’t stop here,” she said.  “That would be more than even I can bear.”

He thought:  “She’s gone through hell herself, to get me out of it.”

          May, 1916. 
     B.E.F., FRANCE.

DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,—­Yes, “Captain,” please. (I can hardly believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good luck getting into dear old Nicky’s regiment.  The whole thing’s incredible.  But promotion’s nothing.  Everybody’s getting it like lightning now.  You’re no sooner striped than you’re starred.

I’m glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks.  I own it was a bit beastly at the time—­quite as beastly as Nicky said it would be; but it was worth while going through with it, especially living in the trenches as a Tommy.  There’s nothing like it for making you know your men.  You can tell exactly what’s going to bother them, and what isn’t.  You’ve got your finger on the pulse of their morale—­not that it’s jumpier than yours; it isn’t—­and their knowing that they haven’t got to stand anything that you haven’t stood gives you no end of a pull.  Honestly, I don’t believe I could have faced them if it wasn’t for that.  So that your morale’s the better for it as well as theirs.  You know, if you’re shot down this minute it won’t matter.  The weediest Tommy in your Company can “carry on.”

We’re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks except my Senior.  John would love us.  There’s a chap who writes short stories and goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find copy; and there’s another who was in the publishing business and harks back to it, now and then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and rather as if he wanted to rub it into us writing chaps what he could do for us, only he wouldn’t; and there’s a tailor who swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came from; and a lawyer’s clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We used to wonder what he’d do with his revolver till we saw what he did with it.) They all love thinking of what they’ve been and telling you about it.  I almost wish I’d gone into Daddy’s business.  Then perhaps I’d know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or an office into the most glorious Army in history.

I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we think he’s a pawnbroker—­who’s always inventing things; stupendous and impossible things.  His last idea was machine-howitzers fourteen feet high, that take in shells exactly as a machine-gun takes in bullets.  He says “You’ll see them in the next War.”  When you ask him how he’s going to transport and emplace and hide his machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says “I never thought of that,” and has another idea at once, even more impossible.