But enough of this. It is time to read myself to sleep. Last week, I went to Atwater Library and borrowed a battered green copy of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m sure, as a great reader yourself, you know that Remarque’s birth name is Erich Paul Remark. His protagonist, named Paul, draws on the author’s own story of fighting on the German side in World War I. There are scenes in this book, of loveliness or anguish, that I know will be seared in my imagination for all time. It is another firsthand account of war that has impressed on me the truth that we are in all time at once, that history is now, that we are in an eternal struggle with power and aggression.

Among the unspeakable horrors Erich Paul Remark makes speakable because of his precision and his humanity, he writes this about his soldiers’ camp on the moors:

But most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands. It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her. And here I have not much companionship, and do not even desire it.

He then goes on to describe the miserable pathos of the Russian prison camp adjacent to the moor, where the enemy’s starvation distresses him so much that he breaks his own cigarettes in half so as to slip them through the fence.

We both know how Wolfe loved birches.

With my warmest regards,

Genevieve (Jenny) Waugh

22 The Ravelled Sleave

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11.

LATE AFTERNOON.

Quebec City, Quebec