I thought I would add a paragraph or two, in case I go down in the morning.  If I come through all right, I shall wipe these paragraphs out.  Meanwhile, in these final hours of wonder and waiting, it is happiness to write on.

I fear that, as I write, I may appear to dogmatise, for I am still only twenty-two.  But I must speak while I can.

What silly things one thinks in an evening of suspense and twilight like this!  One minute I feel I want to be alive this time to-morrow, in order that my book, which has become everything to me, may have a happy ending.  Pennybet fell at Neuve Chapelle, Doe at Cape Helles, and one ought to be left alive to save the face of the tale.  Still, if these paragraphs stand and I fall, it will at least be a true ending—­true to things as they were for the generation in which we were born.

And the glorious bombardment asserts itself through my thoughts, and with a thrill I conceive of it—­for we would-be authors are persons obsessed by one idea—­as an effort of the people of Britain to make it possible for me to come through unhurt and save my story.  I feel I want to thank them.

Another minute I try to recapture that moment of ideal patriotism which I touched on the deck of the Rangoon.  I see a death in No Man’s Land to-morrow as a wonderful thing.  There you stand exactly between two nations.  All Britain with her might is behind your back, reaching down to her frontier, which is the trench whence you have just leapt.  All Germany with her might is before your face.  Perhaps it is not ill to die standing like that in front of your nation.

I cannot bear to think of my mother’s pain, if to-morrow claims me.  But I leave her this book, into which I seem to have poured my life.  It is part of myself.  No, it is myself—­and I shall only return her what is her own.

Oh, but if I go down, I want to ask you not to think it anything but a happy ending.  It will be happy, because victory came to the nation, and that is more important than the life of any individual.  Listen to that bombardment outside, which is increasing, if possible, as the darkness gathers—­well, it is one of the last before the extraordinary Sabbath-silence, which will be the Allies’ Peace.

And, if these pages can be regarded as my spiritual history, they will have a happy ending, too.  This is why.

In the Mediterranean on a summer day, I learned that I was to pursue beauty like the Holy Grail.  And I see it now in everything.  I know that, just as there is far more beauty in nature than ugliness, so there is more goodness in humanity than evil.  There is more happiness in life than pain.  Yes, there is.  As Monty used to say, we are given now and then moments of surpassing joy which outweigh decades of grief, I think I knew such a moment when I won the swimming cup for Bramhall.  And I remember my mother whispering one night:  “If all the rest of my life, Rupert, were to be sorrow, the