The shrapnel fire appears to have stopped for the present.  No, there’s a couple together.  If they fire over this farm I hope they don’t send me back to D.H.Q.

Do you know what I long for more than anything else?  A clean, unhurried breakfast with spotless napery and shining silver and porridge and kippers.  I don’t think these long, lazy after-breakfast hours at Oxford were wasted.  They are a memory and a hope out here.  The shrapnel is getting nearer and more frequent.  We are all hoping it will kill some chickens in the courtyard.  The laws against looting are so strict.

What an excellent musical-box, playing quite a good imitation of Cavalleria Rusticana.  I guess we shall have to move soon.  Too many shells.  Too dark to write any more——­

After all, quite the most important things out here are a fine meal and a good bath.  If you consider the vast area of the war the facts that we have lost two guns or advanced five miles are of very little importance.  War, making one realise the hopeless insignificance of the individual, creates in one such an immense regard for self, that so long as one does well it matters little if four officers have been killed reconnoitring or some wounded have had to be left under an abandoned gun all night.  I started with an immense interest in tactics.  This has nearly all left me and I remain a more or less efficient despatch-carrying animal—­a part of a machine realising the hopeless, enormous size of the machine.

The infantry officer after two months of modern war is a curious phenomenon.[19] He is probably one of three survivors of an original twenty-eight.  He is not frightened of being killed; he has forgotten to think about it.  But there is a sort of reflex fright.  He becomes either cautious and liable to sudden panics, or very rash indeed, or absolutely mechanical in his actions.  The first state means the approach of a nervous breakdown, the second a near death.  There are very few, indeed, who retain a nervous balance and a calm judgment.  And all have a harsh frightened voice.  If you came suddenly out here, you would think they were all mortally afraid.  But it is only giving orders for hours together under a heavy fire.

Battle noises are terrific.  At the present moment a howitzer is going strong behind this, and the concussion is tremendous.  The noise is like dropping a traction-engine on a huge tin tray.  A shell passing away from you over your head is like the loud crackling of a newspaper close to your ear.  It makes a sort of deep reverberating crackle in the air, gradually lessening, until there is a dull boom, and a mile or so away you see a thick little cloud of white smoke in the air or a pear-shaped cloud of grey-black smoke on the ground.  Coming towards you a shell makes a cutting, swishing note, gradually getting higher and higher, louder and louder.  There is a longer note one instant and then it ceases.  Shrapnel bursting close to you has the worst sound.