ure may be happier
and kinder.

This letter is rather disjointed; I'm in charge of the battery for the
time, and messages keep on coming in, and one has to rush out to give
the order to fire.

It's an American night--snow-white and piercing, with a frigid moon
sailing quietly. I think the quiet beauty of the sky is about the only
thing in Nature that we do not scar and destroy with our fighting.

Good-bye, and thank you ever so much.

Yours very sincerely,
CONINGSBY DAWSON.

XLIV

February 1st, 1917.

11 p.m.

DEAR FATHER:

Your picture of the black days when no letter comes from me sets me off
scribbling to you at this late hour. All to-day I've been having a cold
but amusing time at the O.P. (Forward Observation Post). It seems brutal
to say it, but taking potshots at the enemy when they present themselves
is rather fun. When you watch them scattering like ants before the
shell whose direction you have ordered, you somehow forget to think of
them as individuals, any more than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs
that will be left motherless. You watch your victims through your
glasses as God might watch his mad universe. Your skill in directing
fire makes you what in peace times would be called a murderer. Curious!
You're glad, and yet at close quarters only in hot blood would you hurt
a man.

I'd been back for a little over an hour when I had to go forward again
to guide in some guns. The country was dazzlingly white in the
moonlight. As far as eye could see every yard was an old battlefield;
beneath the soft white fleece of snow lay countless unburied bodies.
Like frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the horizon, Hun
lights were shooting up and drifting across our front. Tap-tap-tappity
went the machine-guns; whoo-oo went the heavies, and they always stamp
like angry bulls. I had to come back by myself across the heroic
corruption which the snow had covered. All the way I asked myself why
was I not frightened. What has happened to me? Ghosts should walk here
if anywhere. Moreover, I know that I shall be frightened again when the
war is ended. Do you remember how you once offered me money to walk
through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I wouldn't? I wouldn't if
you offered it to me now. You remember Meredith's lines in "The Woods of
Westermain":

"All the eyeballs under hoods
Shroud you in their glare;
Enter these encha