fully. "I just sit and scratch my head over the
blessed paper, but nothing'll come. Seems as though my head's as empty as a
drum."

"Same here. 'Tisn't like writing love-letters. When I was up to that game
'twas easy enough. When I got stuck I just put in half a page of crosses,
and that filled up fine. But writing to mother and the missus and Sarah and
Jim and the rest is different. You can't fill up with crosses. It would
look ridiklus."

"It would," said Sam.

Then the train began to move, and the soldier in the train sank back on his
seat, took out a cigarette, and began to smoke. I found he had been twice
out at the front, and was now home on sick leave. He had been at the battle
of Mons, through the retreat to the Marne, the advance to the Aisne, the
first battle of Ypres, and the fighting at Festubert. In a word, he had
seen some of the greatest events in the world's history, face to face, and
yet he confessed that when he came to writing a letter, even to his wife,
he could find nothing to say. He was in the position of the lady mentioned
by Horace Walpole, whose letter to her husband began and ended thus: "I
write to you because I have nothing to do: I finish because I have nothing
to say."

I suppose there has never been so much letter-writing in the world as is
going on to-day, and much of it is good writing, as the papers show. But
the case of my companion in the train is the case of thousands and tens of
thousands of young fellows who for the first time in their lives want to
write and discover that they have no gift of self-expression. It is not
that they are stupid. It is that somehow the act of writing paralyses them.
They cannot condense the atmosphere in which they live to the concrete
word. You have to draw them out. They need a friendly lead. When they have
got that they can talk well enough, but without it they are dumb.

In the great sense letter-writing is no doubt a lost art. It was killed by
the penny post and modern hurry. When Madame de Sevigny, Cowper, Horace
Walpole, Byron, Lamb, and the Carlyles wrote their immortal letters the
world was a leisurely place where there was time to indulge in the luxury
of writing to your friends. And the cost of franking a letter made that
letter a serious affair. If you could only send a letter once in a month or
six months, and then at heavy expense, it became a matter of first-rate
consequence. The poor, of course, couldn't enjoy the luxury of
letter-