I told you how he had lost his leg at Loos; a boy to whom legs meant so much. All he says is that he would give the other one, too, if it would do them any good. How are you to even _think_ of your own sorrow in the face of a devotion so invincible, so divine?
We were a little company of close friends to see Himself go off; no woman dare go through that ordeal quite alone. It was an officers’ train, some of them so very, very young, and so pathetically proud to be really going at last in all the panoply of war, with the addition of brand new pith helmets which extinguished their features when they put them on, and made them look like overgrown mushrooms.
There was the usual hustle and delay, but at last the signal blew and the snorting engine dragged them away to the tunnel which swallowed the hearts of half the women left behind. It was an awful moment, just black darkness that could be felt. There is something wrong, Cornelia, something terribly wrong with a world in which such things are possible. People can’t have been meant to suffer so much, yet somehow I feel that we have not come to the end of the pain yet. It is Calvary we are coming to, and this is only getting us ready.
Himself said very little. He just looked wrung and asked some one in a very quick, hoarse voice to take care of me.
So he is away out into the void, the biggest void of all, and I am left to fill up and carry on as best I can.
Your dear letter has turned my thoughts into an entirely new direction. George’s summing up of your feverish war activities in America as "getting restless in your sleep" is really fine. Tell him with my love that I did not think he could have evolved it from his gay inner consciousness. What I am absolutely sure about, is that there is nothing feverish or casual about _his_ war activities. I shall expect to receive a photograph of him in uniform. Age? What is Age? It doesn’t count in this war. The uniform took ten years off Himself’s age and he will see that they are kept off.
I know a man, one of our County magnates, who has given four sons to the war. Two have been killed, one still fights and the last has been invalided out and given a military post at home.
The old man, seventy, if he is a day, has got himself taken on somehow, and in ranker’s uniform acts as his Colonel Son’s orderly and is very particular about the salutes!