." Mr. Britling had
the greatest difficulty in writing back. There were many grave deep
things he wanted to say, and never did. Instead he gave elaborate
details of the small affairs of the Dower House. Once or twice, with a
half-unconscious imitation of his boy's style, he took a shot at the
theological and philosophical hares that Hugh had started. But the
exemplary letters that he composed of nights from a Father to a Son at
War were never written down. It was just as well, for there are many
things of that sort that are good to think and bad to say....

Hugh was not very explicit about his position or daily duties. What he
wrote now had to pass through the hands of a Censor, and any sort of
definite information might cause the suppression of his letter. Mr.
Britling conceived him for the most part as quartered some way behind
the front, but in a flat, desolated country and within hearing of great
guns. He assisted his imagination with the illustrated papers. Sometimes
he put him farther back into pleasant old towns after the fashion of
Beauvais, and imagined loitering groups in the front of cafes; sometimes
he filled in the obvious suggestions of the phrase that all the Pas de
Calais was now one vast British camp. Then he crowded the picture with
tethered horses and tents and grey-painted wagons, and Hugh in the
foreground--bare-armed, with a bucket....

Hugh's letters divided themselves pretty fairly between two main topics;
the first was the interest of the art of war, the second the reaction
against warfare. "After one has got over the emotion of it," he wrote,
"and when one's mind has just accepted and forgotten (as it does) the
horrors and waste of it all, then I begin to perceive that war is
absolutely the best game in the world. That is the real strength of war,
I submit. Not as you put it in that early pamphlet of yours; ambition,
cruelty, and all those things. Those things give an excuse for war, they
rush timid and base people into war, but the essential matter is the
hold of the thing itself upon an active imagination. It's such a big
game. Instead of being fenced into a field and tied down to one set of
tools as you are in almost every other game, you have all the world to
play and you may use whatever you can use. You can use every scrap of
imagination and invention that is in you. And it's wonderful.... But
real soldiers aren't cruel. And war isn't cruel in its essence. Only in
its consequences. Over