These letters, despatched day by day from the trench or the billet, follow each other progressively as a poem does, or a song.  A whole life unfolds, the life of a soul which we may watch through the monotony of its experiences, overcoming them all, or, again, rapt at the coming of supreme trials (as in February and in April) into perfect peace.  It is well that we should trace the spiritual progress of such a dauntless will.  No history of an interior life was ever more touching.  That will is set to endurance, and terrible at times is the effort to endure; we divine this beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative.  Here is an artist and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no means as a life of action.  His whole culture, his whole self-discipline, had been directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility.  Necessarily and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and contemplation.  He had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world, tarnishable under the breath of the crowd.  But now it was for him to lead a life opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this not of necessity but by a completely voluntary act.  That ego he had so jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of human wars; he was no longer to spend his days apart from the jostling and the shouldering and the breath of troops; he was to bear his part in the mechanism that serves the terrible ends of war.  And the close of a life which he would have pronounced, from his former point of view, to be slavery—­the close might be speedy death.  He had to bring himself to look upon his old life—­the life that was lighted by his visions and his hopes, the life that fulfilled his sense of universal existence—­as a mere dream, perhaps never to be dreamed again.

That is what he calls ‘adapting himself.’  And how the word recurs in his letters!  It is a word that teaches him where duty lies, a duty of which the difficulty is to be gauged by the difference of the present from the past, of the bygone hope from the present effort.  ’In the fulness of productiveness,’ he confesses, ’at the hour when life is flowering, a young creature is snatched away, and cast upon a barren soil where all he has cherished fails him.  Well, after the first wrench he finds that life has not forsaken him, and sets to work upon the new ungrateful ground.  The effort calls for such a concentration of energy as leaves no time for either hopes or fears.  And I manage it, except only in moments of rebellion (quickly suppressed) of the thoughts and wishes of the past.  But I need my whole strength at times for keeping down the pangs of memory and accepting what is.’