and done
better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to
them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him
or me, _that_ would have been a jolly sell.

What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful
thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital
on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--_he never came
back again_. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I
don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it
looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did....

June 10th.

Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
suddenly. I wish I could tell you _what_, but we mustn't let on what
happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all
the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time.

If you _must_ know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I
came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right.

Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like
that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling
half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because
now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because
she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench
and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge
is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till
then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three
days we had together.

That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten
about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this
gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is
nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in
it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to
say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He
says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same
as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the
top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed,
he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had
been drunk.

And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a
ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to