IT was not until I got out my letter-book this morning that I realized
that I had let three weeks go by without writing to you. I have no
excuse to offer, unless the suspense of the war may pass as one.
We have settled down to a long war, and though we have settled
down with hope, I can tell you every day demands its courage.
The fall of Antwerp was accepted as inevitable, but it gave us all a
sad day. It was no use to write you things of that sort. You, I presume,
do not need to be told, although you are so far away, that for me,
personally, it could only increase the grief I felt that Washington had
not made the protest I expected when the Belgian frontier was
crossed. It would have been only a moral effort, but it would have
been a blow between the eyes for the nervous Germans.
All the words we get from the front tell us that the boys are standing
the winter in the trenches very well. They've simply got to--that is all
there is to that.
Amélie is more astonished than I am. When she first realized that
they had got to stay out there in the rain and the mud and the cold,
she just gasped out that they never would stand it.
I asked her what they would do then--lie down and let the Germans
ride over them? Her only reply was that they would all die. It is hard
for her to realize yet the resistance of her own race.
I am realizing in several ways, in a small sense, what the men are
enduring. I take my bit of daily exercise walking round my garden. I
always have to carry a trowel in my sweater pocket, and I stop every
ten steps to dig the cakes of mud off my sabots. I take up a good bit
of my landed property at every step. So I can guess, at least, what it
must be out in the trenches. This highly cultivated, well-fertilized
French soil has its inconveniences in a country where the ground
rarely freezes as it does in New England.
Also I am very cold.
When I came out here I found that the coal dealer was willing to
deliver coal to me once a week. I had a long, covered box along the
wall of the kitchen which held an ample supply of coal for the week.
The system had two advantages--it enabled me to do my trading in
the commune, which I liked, and it relieved Amélie from having to
carry heavy hods of coal in all weathers from the grange outside. But,
alas, the railroad communications being cut--no coal! I had big wood
enough to take me through the first weeks, and have some still, but it
will hardly last me to Christmas--nor does the open fire heat the
house as the salamandre did. But it is wartime, and I must not
complain--yet.
You accuse me in your last letter of being flippant in what seems to
you tragic circumstances. I am sorry that I make that impression on
you. I am not a bit flippant. I can only advise you to come over here,
and live a little in this atmosphere, and see how you would feel. I am
afraid that no amount of imagining what one will or will not do
prepares one to know what one will really do face to face with such
actualities as I live amongst. I must confess that had I had anyone
dear to me here, anyone for whose safety or moral courage I was--or
imagined I was--responsible (for, after all, we are responsible for no
one), my frame of mind and perhaps my acts might have been
different. I don't know. Why, none of the men that Î see have the air of
feeling they are heroes--they just seem to think of it all as if it were
merely "in the day's work."
For example, do you remember that handsome younger brother of
my sculptor friend--the English boy who was in the heavy artillery, and
had been in China and North Nigeria with Sir Frederick Ludgard as an
aide-de-camp, and finally as assistant governor general? Well, he
was with the first division of the British Expedition which landed in
France in the middle of August. He made all that long, hard retreat
from Belgium to the Marne, and was in the terrible Battle of the
Rivers. I am enclosing a letter I have just received from him, because
I think it very characteristic. Besides, if you remember him, I am sure
that it will interest you. I don't know where it is from--they are not
allowed to tell. It came, as army letters do, without any stamp--the
carriage is free--with the round red stamp of the censor, a crown in
the middle, and the words "Passed by the Censor," and the number
printed around it. Here it is: