December 21.

I have at last made up my mind.  I’m going to take on this job.  How unwillingly I can hardly tell you.  I wanted to be in the great Push next year so badly.  Everyone, everything, is preparing for it.  The cavalry will get through, and I shall be driving about behind in some gilded car, or watching from some very distant hill with Jezebel (who won’t care a damn whether the cavalry get through or not).

But I had two interviews with the Major and the General to-day.  Coves like painters seem to be rather wanted, and—­well, it’s clear now.  I must go.

To-morrow or next week, perhaps, the extreme fascination of the job will obliterate a certain feeling of flatness, of disappointment, of ... of ... of shirking.  Yes, that’s it:  I feel as if I were shirking all the horrors.  You see, I shall enjoy this job immensely.  All the hateful “arrangering things” for large numbers of men, all the tiresome formalities, all the discomfort, all the future dangers, finished with—­over.  I don’t say that we’ve had long periods of danger or much discomfort; but we’ve had quite enough to make a very ordinary mortal hope never to go through it again.

But to think that I’ve deliberately chosen the easy path.  Well, I don’t care!  I’ve chosen it.  I meant to choose it.  I’m glad I’ve chosen it.  That is the one job in the whole war that I could do really well.  How best to serve the country—­that’s the only question.  So there you are.  I’ve been and took the plunge, and I believe I’m right.

First of all a week or two getting to know the ropes in this corps, and then off with the Major and the General to another corps.

My aunt! what an egoistical letter this is.  However, to you no apologies.

December 22.

[Sidenote:  A DECISION]

Letters have been lurching in, in threes and fours.  But what matters it how they come?  I always know that they are coming.  And the future’s where my heart is always.  So here’s to the letters to come, and here’s to our meeting again, and here’s to Life—­long, sweet, glorious Life.

We shall see the Christmas roses of the Cotswolds together one day, and I think the war will have given them a mysterious loveliness that we never understood before.  Every year they’ll come up out of the ground again and surprise us.  I shall be getting older and older—­and so will you, too.  And all our little plans will have a quiet, peaceful joy for us that wouldn’t have been possible but for the war.  Art will be like angels coming and going.  Effort will be intensified.  The lives of the poor must be happier, because everyone will be more ready to give and take.

It won’t come all at once.  But there’ll be a difference.  The war will have made a difference.  Thank God for the war!

December 25.

[Sidenote:  CHRISTMAS 1916]