now I've got back to my
original amazement at the whole business. I find myself wondering what
we are really up to, why the war began, why we were caught into this
amazing routine. It looks, it feels orderly, methodical, purposeful. Our
officers give us orders and get their orders, and the men back there get
their orders. Everybody is getting orders. Back, I suppose, to Lord
Kitchener. It goes on for weeks with the effect of being quite sane and
intended and the right thing, and then, then suddenly it comes whacking
into one's head, 'But this--this is utterly _mad_!' This going to and
fro and to and fro and to and fro; this monotony which breaks ever and
again into violence--violence that never gets anywhere--is exactly the
life that a lunatic leads. Melancholia and mania.... It's just a
collective obsession--by war. The world is really quite mad. I happen to
be having just one gleam of sanity, that won't last after I have
finished this letter. I suppose when an individual man goes mad and gets
out of the window because he imagines the door is magically impossible,
and dances about in the street without his trousers jabbing at
passers-by with a toasting-fork, he has just the same sombre sense of
unavoidable necessity that we have, all of us, when we go off with our
packs into the trenches....

"It's only by an effort that I can recall how life felt in the spring of
1914. Do you remember Heinrich and his attempt to make a table chart of
the roses, so that we could sit outside the barn and read the names of
all the roses in the barn court? Like the mountain charts they have on
tables in Switzerland. What an inconceivable thing that is now! For all
I know I shot Heinrich the other night. For all I know he is one of the
lumps that we counted after the attack went back.

"It's a queer thing, Daddy, but I have a sort of _seditious_ feeling in
writing things like this. One gets to feel that it is wrong to think.
It's the effect of discipline. Of being part of a machine. Still, I
doubt if I ought to think. If one really looks into things in this
spirit, where is it going to take us? Ortheris--his real name by the by
is Arthur Jewell--hasn't any of these troubles. 'The b----y Germans
butted into Belgium,' he says. 'We've got to 'oof 'em out again. That's
all abart it. Leastways it's all _I_ know.... I don't know nothing about
Serbia, I don't know nothing about anything, except that the Germans got
to stop this sort of gime for