You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to school and college, because it was the thing to do.

It's better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.
Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne Holiday from Princeton to see me?
What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived?
Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are.

We are many other things--we're extraordinary, we're clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant.

We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid--rather not! I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will be "no small stir" when I get there.

How I wish you were with me! This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself.