It is a heavenly day and I have wandered along for the last ½ hour looking dreamily for a place to sit down and enjoy the quiet beauty of everything. I've found the corner of a ploughed field which offers a square yard sufficiently hard & dry to sit on without getting rheumatism. The air is milky soft and a copse of trees near looms up mysteriously with here and there shaky twirls and shivers of sunlight trimming its edges. The earth is chocolate brown where it has been newly turned. In the near distance are quaint red roofed cottages & ricks & lopped elms of queer shapes shading them. The bean fields have been harvested & the beans are looped up in bunches on long poles.
The leaves are just beginning to turn to gold, and everything has the spirit of repose that goes with Autumn. Its heavenly beautiful but the sinister bumping & rumbling in the distance and the droning of an aeroplane somewhere out of sight jar inexpressibly. It jars so because in the Autumn everything suggests peace & plenty & yet men are Killing each other near for the protection of their homes. It didn't jar as in the Spring to feel that, I think because Spring suggests life & vigour & ambition, while Autumn suggests achievement & age & satisfaction. But while we're young an full of life we should want to live in the Springtime.
5, Lance Sergeant Theodore Penleigh Boyd, AEMMBC, June 1916, somewhere in France
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