o Gilbert's restored life
a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war.

CHAPTER XXI

The War Years

GILBERT WAS TAKING up life again and with it the old friendships and
the old debates, in the new atmosphere created by the war.

To Bernard Shaw he wrote:

June 12th, 1915

MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,

I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for
your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more
for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the
time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a
very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must
reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less
like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must
necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where
and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?" How can I get hold of it?
I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one
unusually hungry for good literature. "Il me faut des geants," as
Cyrano says; so I naturally wish to hear the last about you. You
probably know that I do not agree with you about the War; I do not
think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in
accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most
difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. If it were an
easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. If a cat
has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian
feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws
its powers from Hell. I have always thought that there was in Prussia
an evil will; I would not have made it a ground for going to war, but
I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. But I
suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all
that. Meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my
opinions; and I do not think those are insincere.

Yours always sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Bernard Shaw replied:

22nd June 1915

MY DEAR CHESTERTON

I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered
all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. You have also
the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of
mine that every man of genius has a