Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.

Thoughts are wonderful things, that they can bring two people, so far apart, into harmony and understanding for even a little while.

I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.

For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over.