sandbags, when the men look like
men again and smoke and talk and read ... if you could see what lies
beneath the dressings!

When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a
man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others.

I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night--two
bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar
whistling to his mate in the black and rustling garden.

But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.

Those distant guns again to-night....

Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter,
and the windows tremble. Is the lull when _they_ go over the top?

I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, "What is
it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it." But that won't
do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that
I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.

Summer.... Can it be summer through whose hot air the guns shake and
tremble? The honeysuckle, whose little stalks twinkled and shone that
January night, has broken at each woody end into its crumbled flower.

Where is the frost, the snow?... Where are the dead?

Where is my trouble and my longing, and the other troubles, and the
happiness in other summers?

Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the
throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water.

We talk of tablets to the dead. There can be none but in the heart, and
the heart fades.

There are only ten men left in bed in the ward. Sometimes I think, "Will
there never be another convoy?"

And then: "Is not one man alone sufficient matter on which to reflect?"
"One can find God in a herring's head...." says a Japanese proverb.

When there is not much to do in the ward and no sound comes from behind
the screens, when there has not been a convoy for weeks, when the little
rubber tubes lie in the trolley-drawer and the syringe gives place to
the dry dressing--then they set one of us aside from the work of the
ward to sit at a table and pad splints.

It isn't supposed to be a job we care for, and I am keeping up the
delusion, but all the time I run my seams straight, pull the horsehair
out to the last fine shred, turn in my corners as the corners of a
leather book are turned, so that I may be kept at it, although out of
cunning I appear to grumble and long to be