CARRY ON. Letters in War-Time by Coningsby Dawson, 1917

Published by John Lane Company. Tan cloth hardcover book with gilt lettering, frontispiece, 133 pages plus ads. Fair condition: owner’s inscription dated 1917, cover soil, some pages chipped and soiled. Wartime letters, as the title impliles.

“They do not profess to give any new information about the military operations of the Allies; this is the task of the publicist, and at all times is forbidden to the soldier in the field. Here and there some striking or significant fact has been allowed to pass the censor; but the value of the letters does not lie in these things. It is found rather in the record of how the dreadful yet heroic realities of war affect an unusually sensitive mind, long trained in moral and romantic idealism; the process by which this mind adapts itself to unanticipated and incredible conditions, to acts and duties which lie close to horror, and are only saved from being horrible by the efficacy of the spiritual effort which they evoke. Hating the brutalities of the War, clearly perceiving the wide range of its cruelties, yet the heart of the writer is never hardened by its daily commerce with death; It is purified by pity and terror, by heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature seems fresh annealed into a finer strength.”