w black disks
with the number in white.

You must not mind if I am dull these days. I have been studying a
map of the battle-front, which I got by accident. It is not inspiring. It
makes one realize what there is ahead of us to do. It will be done--but
at what a price!

Still, spring is here, and in spite of one's self, it helps.

XI

May 18, 1915

All through the month of April I intended to write, but I had not the
courage.

All our eyes were turned to the north where, from April 22 to
Thursday, May 13--five days ago--we knew the second awful battle at
Ypres was going on. It seems to be over now.

What with the new war deviltry, asphyxiating gas--with which the
battle began, and which beat back the line for miles by the terror of its
surprise--and the destruction of the Lusitania on the 7th, it has been a
hard month. It has been a month which has seen a strange change
of spirit here.

I have tried to impress on you, from the beginning, that odd sort of
optimism which has ruled all the people about me, even under the
most trying episodes of the war. Up to now, the hatred of the
Germans has been, in a certain sense, impersonal. It has been a
racial hatred of a natural foe, an accepted evil, just as the uncalled-for
war was. It had wrought a strange, unexpected, altogether
remarkable change in the French people. Their faces had become
more serious, their bearing more heroic, their laughter less frequent,
and their humor more biting. But, on the day, three weeks ago, when
the news came of the first gas attack, before which the Zouaves and
the Turcos fled with blackened faces and frothing lips, leaving
hundreds of their companions dead and disfigured on the road to
Langtmarck, there arose the first signs of awful hatred that I had
seen.

I frankly acknowledge that, considering the kind of warfare the world
is seeing today, I doubt very much if it is worse to be asphyxiated
than to be blown to pieces by an obus. But this new and devilish arm
which Germany has added to the horrors of war seemed the last
straw, and within a few weeks, I have seen grow up among these
simple people the conviction that the race which planned and
launched this great war has lost the very right to live; and that none of
the dreams of the world which looked towards happiness can ever be
realized while Prussia exists, even if the war lasts twenty years, and
even if, before it is over, the whole world has to take a hand in i