urse. But there never could be a library here big enough
to keep us going. We can do with all sorts of books, but I don't think
the ordinary sensational novel is quite the catch it was for a lot of
them in peace time. Some break towards serious reading in the oddest
fashion. Old Park, for example, says he wants books you can chew; he is
reading a cheap edition of 'The Origin of Species.' He used to regard
Florence Warden and William le Queux as the supreme delights of print. I
wish you could send him Metchnikoff's 'Nature of Man' or Pearson's
'Ethics of Freethought.' I feel I am building up his tender mind. Not
for me though, Daddy. Nothing of that sort for me. These things take
people differently. What I want here is literary opium. I want something
about fauns and nymphs in broad low glades. I would like to read
Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.' I don't think I have read it, and yet I have a
very distinct impression of knights and dragons and sorcerers and wicked
magic ladies moving through a sort of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry
scenery--only with a light on them. I could do with some Hewlett of the
'Forest Lovers' kind. Or with Joseph Conrad in his Kew Palm-house mood.
And there is a book, I once looked into it at a man's room in London; I
don't know the title, but it was by Richard Garnett, and it was all
about gods who were in reduced circumstances but amidst sunny
picturesque scenery. Scenery without steel or poles or wire. A thing
after the manner of Heine's 'Florentine Nights.' Any book about Greek
gods would be welcome, anything about temples of ivory-coloured stone
and purple seas, red caps, chests of jewels, and lizards in the sun. I
wish there was another 'Thais.' The men here are getting a kind of
newspaper sheet of literature scraps called _The Times_ Broadsheets.
Snippets, but mostly from good stuff. They're small enough to stir the
appetite, but not to satisfy it. Rather an irritant--and one wants no
irritant.... I used to imagine reading was meant to be a stimulant. Out
here it has to be an anodyne....

"Have you heard of a book called 'Tom Cringle's Log'?

"War is an exciting game--that I never wanted to play. It excites once
in a couple of months. And the rest of it is dirt and muddle and
boredom, and smashed houses and spoilt roads and muddy scenery and
boredom, and the lumbering along of supplies and the lumbering back of
the wounded and weary--and boredom, and continual vague guessing of how
it will end and bo