p.

Letter No. 82 - Wednesday Nov. 12th

Major J.H. Massey
6 Palestinian Coy. The Buffs
M.E.F.

My own darling Barbara

You raised & discussed & asked some quite
serious questions in your letter which came to me
on Monday & I think that I had better try & reply to these
before another letter comes from you & makes me to talk about
other things & also before I go too long without a letter &
become so miserable again that I can only write about that.

You talked about religion & went on to say that we should
all try to live less selfishly & lead the "good life" & then
that we should be thinking things out in order to work
towards something better.

Well, I have thought a great deal - not particularly definitely
& not with very much of a plan & practically never with
any opportunity to test my thoughts in argument or
discussion with anybody for whose opinions I have any
respect. That is one of my troubles out here. I have not
you to talk to & I have not you to criticise me & make
me think about myself & being C.O. my officers have
to be very respectful. And the result is not exactly
that I am becoming very pleased with myself, but
I am very critical of nearly everybody else & consider myself
vastly superior to them. (This is becoming more of
a discussion about myself than about post-war reconstruction
but it is really rather necessary to what I am
going to write about). I don't mean to say that I think
I am very clever because I don't think that & I also
know that I am not too well educated & I am most
certainly very ill read in comparison to you, & people
like Frank Macaskie & many others. But what I
do find so widely & so generally is Englishmen out
here who have no real honstey or sense of decency.