Hugh’s letters divided themselves pretty fairly between two main topics; the first was the interest of the art of war, the second the reaction against warfare.  “After one has got over the emotion of it,” he wrote, “and when one’s mind has just accepted and forgotten (as it does) the horrors and waste of it all, then I begin to perceive that war is absolutely the best game in the world.  That is the real strength of war, I submit.  Not as you put it in that early pamphlet of yours; ambition, cruelty, and all those things.  Those things give an excuse for war, they rush timid and base people into war, but the essential matter is the hold of the thing itself upon an active imagination.  It’s such a big game.  Instead of being fenced into a field and tied down to one set of tools as you are in almost every other game, you have all the world to play and you may use whatever you can use.  You can use every scrap of imagination and invention that is in you.  And it’s wonderful....  But real soldiers aren’t cruel.  And war isn’t cruel in its essence.  Only in its consequences.  Over here one gets hold of scraps of talk that light up things.  Most of the barbarities were done—­it is quite clear—­by an excited civilian sort of men, men in a kind of inflamed state.  The great part of the German army in the early stage of the war was really an army of demented civilians.  Trained civilians no doubt, but civilians in soul.  They were nice orderly clean law-abiding men suddenly torn up by the roots and flung into quite shocking conditions.  They felt they were rushing at death, and that decency was at an end.  They thought every Belgian had a gun behind the hedge and a knife in his trouser leg.  They saw villages burning and dead people, and men smashed to bits.  They lived in a kind of nightmare.  They didn’t know what they were doing.  They did horrible things just as one does them sometimes in dreams....”

He flung out his conclusion with just his mother’s leaping consecutiveness.  “Conscript soldiers are the ruin of war....  Half the Germans and a lot of the French ought never to have been brought within ten miles of a battlefield.

“What makes all this so plain are the diaries the French and English have been finding on the dead.  You know at the early state of the war every German soldier was expected to keep a diary.  He was ordered to do it.  The idea was to keep him interested in the war.  Consequently, from the dead and wounded our people have got thousands....  It helps one to realise that the Germans aren’t really soldiers at all.  Not as our men are.  They are obedient, law-abiding, intelligent people, who have been shoved into this.  They have to see the war as something romantic and melodramatic, or as something moral, or as tragic fate.  They have to bellow songs about ‘Deutschland,’ or drag in ‘Gott.’  They don’t take to the game as our men take to the game....

“I confess I’m taking to the game.  I wish at times I had gone into the O.T.C. with Teddy, and got a better hold of it.  I was too high-browed about this war business.  I dream now of getting a commission....