Autograph letter signed : from an unspecified battlefield, to "My dear Wilkinson", 1917 June 10.

Concerning his book and the battle he is witnessing from the front; thanking him for his book which is he reading again "with ever more pleasure than when I was a recruit.. I see better how much it needs to be read by people who have been in the 'new' Army for a time and have been jumped up through the lower stages of promotion. We are all, inevitably, products of cramming and have the faults of that kind. I mean, we have been rushed through the foundational parts of our training and there are bags of things which we ought to have learnt well at first and are now assuming ourselves to know, but don't know really;" asking if he might write a similar book about army organization; saying that "the 'New' Army officer attached to a staff is like a new boy at school, who has to pick up the routine and custom of his trade as the boy imbibes those of his particular school, but making mistakes and slowly extracting from the atmosphere round him that he should or should not button the bottom button of his waistcoat or turn up the ends of his trousers. I should think the new man would become useful much more quickly if you made a lot of these things clear in the way you do the use of the rifle. I saw the new battle begin on Thursday, from a hill just behind our front -- or rather I saw all but the first 10 seconds of it, for I am soldier enough now to put in an hour's sleep whenever I can get it, and had stretched down under a hedge at 2 o'clock and was awaked by the rocking of the hill when our mines went up -- and so I missed seeing the first flare of them. They were fine and would have pleased Fleullen. The bombardment was more striking than the Arras one -- like an extremely rapid piece played very precisely on a piano, & this prestissimo execution of music so heavily thunderous had an effect almost comic, as if an elephant were dancing a hornpipe for all he was worth. I wish you could have heard and seen it all;" adding, in a postscript, "I hope I am right in not calling you Professor on the envelope -- one of your brethren once rebuked me for giving him the title, and I am afraid."