I feel as though I were recovering from typhoid fever.  What I chiefly enjoy is water; the running and the sleeping waters of the Meuse.  The springs play on weeds and pebbles.  The ponds lie quiet under great trees.  Streams and waterfalls.  On the steep hillsides the snow looks brilliant and visionary.  I live in all these things without forms of words.  And I am rather ashamed to be vegetating, though I think all must pass through this phase, just removed from the hell of the front.  I eat, and when my horrid rheumatism allows, I sleep.

Don’t be angry with my inferiority.  I feel as though my armour had been taken off.  Well, I can’t help it.

5 o’clock.

I am a good deal tired by drill.  But the fine air of the Meuse keeps me in health.  Dear mother, I wish I might always seek all that is noble and good.  I wish I might always feel within myself the inspiration that urges towards the true treasures of life.  But alas! just now I have a mind of lead.

March 14, Sunday morning, in the Sabbath peace.

DEAREST MOTHER,—­Your good, life-giving letters have come at last, after my long privation, the price I paid for my enjoyment of rest.  The pretty town is waking in the haze of the river, the waters hurry over their clean stones.  All things have that look of moderation and charming finish that is characteristic of this part of the country.

I read a little, but I am so overtired by the physical exertion to which we are compelled, that I fall asleep on the instant.  We are digging trenches and trenches.

Dear mother, to go back to those wonderful times of the end of February, I must repeat that my memory of them is something like that of an experiment in science.  I had conceived violence under a theoretic formula; I had divined its part in the worlds.  But I had not yet witnessed its actual practice, except in infinitely small examples.  And now at last violence was displayed before me on such a scale that my whole faculty of receptiveness was called upon to face it.  Well, it was interesting; and I may tell you that I never relaxed from my attitude of cool and impersonal watchfulness.  What I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things, a setting that dramatised itself as ‘artistically’ as in any stage-management.  During all those minutes I never relaxed in my resolve to see ‘how it was.’

I was very happy to find that the ‘intoxication of slaughter’ never had any possession of me.  I hope it will always be so.  Unfortunately, contact with the German race has for ever spoilt my opinion of those people.  I cannot quite succeed in quelling a sensibility and a humanitarianism that I know to be misplaced, and that would make me the dupe of a treacherous enemy; but I have come to tolerate things which I had held in abomination as the very negation of life.