marker.’  The country about us is flat—­featureless—­desolate.  How I long for hills, even for Essex mud hills.  Then the road runs on towards the front, a brick road frightfully worn, lined with poplars.  Just at the end of the village mechanical transport ends and there is a kind of depot from which all the stuff goes up by mules or men or bicycles to the trenches.  It is the only movement in the place, and I have spent hours watching men shift grub or ammunition or lending them a hand.  All day one hears guns, a kind of thud at the stomach, and now and then one sees an aeroplane, very high and small.  Just beyond this point there is a group of poplars which have been punished by a German shell.  They are broken off and splintered in the most astonishing way; all split and ravelled out like the end of a cane that has been broken and twisted to get the ends apart.  The choice of one’s leisure is to watch the A.S.C. or play football, twenty a side, or sit about indoors, or stand in the doorway, or walk down to the Estaminet and wait five or six deep for the billiard-table.  Ultimately one sits.  And so you get these unconscionable letters.”

“Unconscionable,” said Mr. Britling.  “Of course—­he will grow out of that sort of thing.

“And he’ll write some day, sure enough.  He’ll write.”

He went on reading the letter.

“We read, of course.  But there never could be a library here big enough to keep us going.  We can do with all sorts of books, but I don’t think the ordinary sensational novel is quite the catch it was for a lot of them in peace time.  Some break towards serious reading in the oddest fashion.  Old Park, for example, says he wants books you can chew; he is reading a cheap edition of ‘The Origin of Species.’  He used to regard Florence Warden and William le Queux as the supreme delights of print.  I wish you could send him Metchnikoff’s ‘Nature of Man’ or Pearson’s ‘Ethics of Freethought.’  I feel I am building up his tender mind.  Not for me though, Daddy.  Nothing of that sort for me.  These things take people differently.  What I want here is literary opium.  I want something about fauns and nymphs in broad low glades.  I would like to read Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen.’  I don’t think I have read it, and yet I have a very distinct impression of knights and dragons and sorcerers and wicked magic ladies moving through a sort of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry scenery—­only with a light on them.  I could do with some Hewlett of the ‘Forest Lovers’ kind.  Or with Joseph Conrad in his Kew Palm-house mood.  And there is a book, I once looked into it at a man’s room in London; I don’t know the title, but it was by Richard Garnett, and it was all about gods who were in reduced circumstances but amidst sunny picturesque scenery.  Scenery without steel or poles or wire.  A thing after the manner of Heine’s ‘Florentine Nights.’  Any book about Greek gods would be welcome, anything about temples of ivory-coloured stone and purple seas,