To his mother Charlotte Capell
Wednesday, Oct 6th [1915]
[?near Loos]
Beloved Mother:
We are back in a scene of former labours, - but this time in a big empty brewery. I hope to be able to get out to see the schoolmaster & wife. In retrospect we seem to have spent the last three days paddling in mud: mud everywhere, in everything. Alas, Autumn has come on us utterly. The lovely September days were drowned in rain and mud, two days before the attack began.
I was much interested in your account of the new "Northamptons". W. Crick is certainly lucky to get out of it so cheaply. Everyone's secret heart's desire is a "blighty one" (_Blight, being the new slang for England).
Just my luck, I was again on guard for the 24 hours before we left; no escaping the mud at the post, and trying to sleep during the "four" (hours) off in an abandoned family barouche in an abandoned chateau stables.
You ask me about winter clothes. I will write as soon as I want any. I don't want the leather jacket yet. I have stuck to the nice wool cardigan I had at St Albans last winter. One thing I shall want & I have already ordered it from my Southampton Row tailor, a good greatcoat. My army one is a complete fraud. The socks Esther Ashmead-Bartlett sent me have been my standby (& on) for months. - thick soft wool, generously large and long in the leg. But every time we move what a tax on one's ingenuity to keep one's little possessions...
I only know from the papers what is happening on the front - tho' we are so near. Tuesday's papers had rather bad news, I think. If only the Germans will counter attack desperately enough. That gives our people a chance to lay them low. Out on the field what passionate love & pity I felt for our poor wrecked khaki forms, and what sick revulsion at the grey Germans - "white Chinese" I heard one of our chaps call them. And their wounded groan and whine without decency or restraint: - touching it would be to the inexperienced, but to us, who have seen so many of our own people's set lips? What an extraordinary muddle in the Balkans. So sad that we should be killing Turks - & now Bulgars, when the same men might have been slaughtering the accursed German brood.
Send news of me to Edith & Jo and to Marge. I hardly know how to write to Marge. At such a distance she demands something formed and coherent, and I can only jot down to you, my dear, scattered day by day impressions.
I heard today from a burial party that only one uncollected wounded man was found alive by them on the Sunday morning on that stretch of ground where Chapin and I had been on the Saturday. That, in a ghastly sort of way is satisfactory, rather, I think. We broke our backs to some little purpose. Better than writing sickly bosh about the attack in the way Phillip Gibbs and one or two other Grub-Streeters have done. How I longed for huge muscular force - what I had used to despise.. Stretcher bearing is really cruelly toilsome in those conditions.
One sight I saw I stamped on my memory - the epitome of 1915 heroics, - one of our dead fallen on the German parapet, evidently shot dead as he was in the act of firing or had just fired, the rifle still at his shoulder his dead face looking along the sight; heroic in death. Plenty of dead Germans about, they had come out of the trench to surrender or to get elbow room for a fight. Our fellows have got heaps of little souvenirs from rifled dug-outs. Domestic photographs of a sort you can guess. But nothing of that sort can touch me now from their side.
I have scribbled this note in a snatched minute. Adieu, my dearest, I am quite well. Richard