My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

No one ever wins a war, and wars are never over.

Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.

Length of service: one year or duration of war. Duration of war, of course. He didn't want to spend a whole year in the army.

Papa," she said easily, happily, walking across the park with him to the Albert Hall. "What is it like to be in love?" "Oh, it’s marvellous," he said. "Or terrible. Or both. The Romans saw it as a fit of madness that you wouldn’t wish on anybody. But there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s the main thing.

... what he could or couldn’t say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it’s hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it’s only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don’t want to be a coward, but I don’t understand, either I kill people, or I’m a coward, that’s the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can’t say, ‘I don’t accept that’ – and I have accepted it, for a year I’ve accepted it, this is the situation but I don’t understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night— and now they’ve made me a fucking officer — What the fuck could he say to any of them? Well, there’ll be none of that swearing for a start.

They were completely happy. They couldn't stop smiling at each other, beaming like fools till their cheeks ached.

He was astounded, sometimes, by the fluid articulacy of his own fury.

They did not talk about the larger present, so circumscribed, so uncontrollable. Their little present was two bodies and a bed, and that was the entirety of time and place: them, there, in their little room, awkward, laughing, happy, warm, tentative, surrendering, overwhelmed, alarmed, astounded, shivering, subsiding, asleep, awake, getting the hang of it, learning, loving, redeemed. Happy.

Last year we had many smallish hopes, made many smallish attempts, suffered many smallish failures, and we died one by one. This year a change of plan! One big hope, one big push, one big fuck-up, and we all die at once.

Look how beautiful the green lawns of the park are in the misty evening light, unmuddied, smooth, alive, no holes, no bodies, no barbed wire, no explosions. Such a simple thing to be grateful for. No wrongness. Can no wrongness be enough to make rightness? God, no wrongness. No wrongness would be fucking marvellous.

He's a man, she thought, and the very word gave her s frisson, a lurch inside.

More talk of love would lead to the difficulties surrounding...Oh, God, he loved her, he did, she did, they did, it was. It was.

Courage for the big troubles in life, patience for the small. And when you have laboriously finished your day's efforts, go to sleep in peace. Be of good cheer.

...one of the new conscripts, a useless, terrified little creature.... These boys are no use out here. Why send them? Why not recognise that cowardice is a fact and most cowards wish they weren't, and it's not their fault and it's not under their control, and keep them the hell out of our way while we get on with it?