e since been hard at it
firing. Your letters reached me in the midst of a bombardment--I read
them in a kind of London fog of gun-powder smoke, with my steel helmet
tilted back, in the interval of commanding my section through a
megaphone.

Don't suppose that I'm in any way unhappy--I'm as cheerful as a cricket
and do twice as much hopping--I have to. There's something
extraordinarily bracing about taking risks and getting away with
it--especially when you know that you're contributing your share to a
far-reaching result. My mother is the mother of a soldier now, and
soldiers' mothers don't lie awake at night imagining--they just say a
prayer for their sons and leave everything in God's hands. I'm sure
you'd far rather I died than not play the man to the fullest of my
strength. It isn't when you die that matters--it's how. Not but what I
intend to return to Newark and make the house reek of tobacco smoke
before I've done.

We're continually in action now, and the casualty to B. has left us
short-handed--moreover we're helping out another battery which has lost
two officers. As you've seen by the papers, we've at last got the Hun on
the run. Three hundred passed me the other day unescorted, coming in to
give themselves up as prisoners. They're the dirtiest lot you ever set
eyes on, and looked as though they hadn't eaten for months. I wish I
could send you some souvenirs. But we can't send them out of France.

I'm scribbling by candlelight and everything's jumping with the stamping
of the guns. I wear the locket and cross all the time.

Yours with much love,
Con.

XVIII

October 13th, 1916.

DEAR ONES:

I have only time to write and assure you that I am safe. We're living in
trenches at present--I have my sleeping bag placed on a stretcher to
keep it fairly dry. By the time you get this we expect to be having a
rest, as we've been hard at it now for an unusually long time. How I
wish that I could tell you so many things that are big and vivid in my
mind-but the censor--!

Yesterday I had an exciting day. I was up forward when word came through
that an officer still further forward was wounded and he'd been caught
in a heavy enemy fire. I had only a kid telephonist with me, but we
found a stretcher, went forward and got him out. The earth was hopping
up and down like pop-corn in a frying pan. The unfortunate thing was
that the poor chap die