'I adore war,' Julian Grenfell reported to his mother from the Flemish trenches in 1914, in a letter which she proudly sent on for anonymous publication in the Times. Stalking Germans through the mud was not very different from stalking partridges, as he noted in his game book: 'November 16th; 1 Pomeranian. November 17th; 2 Pomeranians.' Two decades later in Spain, Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was 'perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory', one of the chief pleasures being 'getting back into male society'. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. 'I did quite well that day,' he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. 'He did well here, and died bloody well,' he observed on another occasion of a gallant friend who preceded him to the grave. The blood-stained final letter which Julian Grenfell sent home from Flanders ran:

LRB 9 October 1986 | PDF Download