YOUTH AND DEATH.
[To EDITOR or aue "fiememoa."1
See,—The letter published in the Spectator of June 16th and written by a Public School boy was very fine. Perhaps it may interest your readers to see the enclosed extract from a letter written to me by my office boy, aged nineteen years and two or three months, and educated at un ordinary Council school. Letters such es these speak well for the future of the Empire.
" France, Ifth Noy. OIL
I think you will not find I have altered much after the war. My spirits are still as young as they were before, although this is a strange thing to say with the war going on on every side. Last night was the finest sunset I have ever seen. I sat in a bay for a long time watching it, and picturing what it would look like over -- Moor, for instance. Such nights as these make the war seem a queer game, with the cuckoos calling over the destitute land and the sun shining warmly on the small crosses of the dead. As ii gets dark the artillery and machine-guns get busy, and hardly On hour after this I got the wind of a machine-gun bullet post my forehead. A half-inch difference might have been an ' R.I.P.' was going down an old road just behind the line when the Gem.nv swept it bark and forward with machine-gun fire. Far any one to escape through such a hail it makes one realise, only then. what Providence it is that is watching over us. But such little episodes are easily laughed at and by next day are forgotten. The life makes us so. Sometimes, when we are out of the trenchea, I take a walk into the country and try to see things as I used to see at home, but the French countryside is a poor substitute; for the God-forsaken landscape only breeds despondency. The inns or estaminets are cold, bare places. not at all like what one is accustomed to see in Yorkshire. You can have all France for a Yorkshire moor track at sunset, with a few grouse, curlews, and sheep, but tio other sign of life. I received your second letter yesterday, and am returning --'s letter herewith. He seems to be having a pleasant time, but I would not change with him. To have been in a war like this is an experience worth passim: through. The Germans are as sharp and cute as we ore, and will take some beating yet. The black cat you speak about was one which stayed with me for a bit in the front line. It came up one night while I was on sentry and stayed with me for two,houes, sat open the parades absolutely scorning the bullets. We often get these eats sip in the line. Left behind in a shelled ruin house when the owners have fled, they wander about, living. I !suppose, OR the rats, of which there are endless hordes."
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