WE count the weeks no more. It was winter when
I came up, and when the shells exploded the
frozen clods of earth were just as dangerous as the
fragments. Now the trees are green again. Our life
alternates between billets and the front. We have
almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of
death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and
dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent,
more varied and terrible.

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the
changes of the days; -- when we are resting they
are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters
within and without.

Everyone is so, not only ourselves here -- the
things that existed before are no longer valid, and
one practically knows them no more. Distinctions,
breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted
out and hardly recognizable any longer. Sometimes
they give an advantage for profiting by a situation;
-- but they also bring consequences along with

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