Far away in the distance I can hear the pipers playing. It always makes me think of Loch Lomond and when we were little tads. How green and quiet and cool those days seem now—the long rides across the moors and down the glens, the bathing in little mountain streams, the walks in the sad twilights. There are so many happy memories I have to thank you for. You were very wise and generous in the way you planned my childhood. I'm less than a fortnight back at the Front, but I'm already falling into the old habit of happy retrospect. We don't live here really. Our souls are in France only for brief and glorious and intense intervals—during the moments of attack and repulse. The rest of the time we're away in the green valleys of remembered places, watching the ghosts who are the shadows of what we were.
My groom is a boy named Gilpin. The name has proved his downfall. He galloped my horse on the hard road the other day, which is forbidden. A colonel caught him going full tilt, stopped him and took his name. When the severities seemed ended this innocent young party asked the colonel to hold his horse while he mounted—so now he's up on an extra charge of insolence.
Army discipline is in many ways silly and old maidish. Here's a chap who's faithful, well conducted, and honest. He's likely to get a heavier punishment for asking a superior officer to hold his horse than if he'd been drunk and uproarious.
It's funny to recall the different graveyards among the shell-holes that I've learnt to call home. Once life was so definitely focused—much too definitely for my patience. It seemed as though I was rooted and planted for all eternity. It never seemed to me then that I should ever find the sacrificial opportunity or be stirred to any prophetic exaltations. It's wonderful the way the angel of Death, as discovered in war, can give one visions of limitless nobilities, each one of which is attainable and accessible.
I'm by myself at the Battery. It's late afternoon, and a thunderstorm is brewing. The room is dark (I mean the dug-out); I feel as though it were November instead of April. What a queer life this is. In one way I have not had so much idleness since I was in hospital—then comes a burst of physical strenuosity out of all proportion to one's strength. Things happen by fits and starts; you never know what is going to happen next.