He’s got his truth all right.  As Morrie would say:  “That’s War.”  But a peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing.  And if our truth—­what we’ve seen—­isn’t War, at any rate it’s what we’ve got out of it, it’s our “glory,” our spiritual compensation for the physical torture, and there would be a sort of infamy in trying to take it from us.  It isn’t the French Government, or the British that’s fighting Germany; it’s we—­all of us.  To insist on the world remembering nothing but these horrors is as if men up to their knees in the filth they’re clearing away should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing it about.

The filth of War—­and the physical torture—­Good God!  As if the world was likely to forget it.  Any more than we’re likely to forget what we know.

You remember because you’ve known it before and it all hangs together.  It’s not as if danger were the only point of contact with reality.  You get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing.  At least to me it’s like that.  You know what Nicky thought it was like.  You know what it was like when you used to sit looking and looking at Mother’s “tree of Heaven.”

It’s odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get reality, trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter satisfaction; to have funked coming out here because you thought it was all obscene ugliness and waste and frustration, and then to come out, and to find what you wanted.

* * * * *

     June 25th.

I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see it.  It’s horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton’s dead and that Mother should think that Nicky’s dead, when they wouldn’t, if they really knew.  If they don’t believe Lawrence or me, can’t they believe Nicky?  I’m only saying what he said.  But I can’t write to them about it because they make me shy, and I’m afraid they’ll think I’m only gassing, or “making poetry”—­as if poetry wasn’t the most real thing there is!

If anybody can make them see it, you can.—­Always your affectionate,

     MICHAEL.

XXV

Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the workshop.

He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky’s death, and had not opened it again until to-day.  This afternoon in the orchard he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were broken and he had thought that he would like to make new ones, and the wood was in the workshop.

Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with his Moving Fortress.  The brass and steel filings lay in a heap under the lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had left it; pits in the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood.  His overalls hung over the bench where he had slipped them off.