How does this concert seem to you ? I think it is good, worth sacrificeing the Sunday Evening fire for. I’ll book Oliver if you think it is all right.

                        I have just listened to the Armistice Service, most moving and disturbing, and it shakes one up. The ghastly part was the “incident”, whatever it was, turned my inside over, made me sit all pale and angry and hurt. Immediately after Big Ben had struck and the Silence had become thick and heavy, some graceless fool started shouting and screaming about “War”, and the muffled scandalised ‘Ohs” of the crowd, the galloping of the mounted police and the struggling of the lunatic were truly horrible, macabre in the deadliest style. Fortunately they muzzled him quickly and the Silence proceeded. But it was grim. The Last Post sooothed, and the Reveille brought things back to normal. But it pretty shattering altogether.

                        It is a strange world, and who is right ? It seems as though the wishes of the individual, no matter how consistent they are, are controlled by some intangible force, pressing forward towards whatever ghastliness the future holds. We all, Germans, Italians, French and West Africans, want to earn our bread in peace and live in quietness, – yet this Something keeps us moving, slipping down. Perhaps all will be well, but even the optimistic me is coming to see a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, on the horizon. Man is such a friendly peacable animal really. ‘But as nothing can be done one must hope and be merry, and perhaps, tomorrow we shall live. Its getting harder not to see oneself as a victim, prepared carefully for the sacrifice. When I was a child I thought all healthy men were such, it was natural, when you knew a young man, watched him playing football at school and cleaned his study for him, saw him come down the next term resplendent in uniform and shining sam-brown, and then heard the Head read out his name in the casualty list at Prayers a month later, – killed inaction.  And if we come to it again, how pitifully wasteful was the sacrifice of those of 1914-18. But. . . what – the – hell, what – the – hell as they say.      |

  Tut and tut again, one should keep a hold. I am sorry to burdon you with my own reflections, conjured up by memories of a fantastic childhood brought to life by the Last Post and that Silence. It must not be stopped, that would be grievous callousness. But as Fabian Ware says, we should not choose November 11th. the day of Germany’s defeat. If we chose a happy bright clear day, on which there was no major engagement, then the old enemies could join with the so-called victors, and then it would be a joint memory to the Dead of the War, and perhaps we should get International recognition of the crass stupidity of it all.

                        Oh dearie me, dearie me, I must stop, I shall go on in this vein too long, tis but the mood of the moment, one of deep “pip”. I must write a story and get it off my chest.

                        Tomorrow at seven then, unless something annoying happens. And I call for your Mother and your cousin dog and his lady at a quarter to seven or before on Saturday, and so my love and fare thee well. Us is a good idea.

I have duly put the lint on my poorly leg, with adhesive plaster round top and bottom, it looks very distingusihed and “please Matron- Ish”