-a gentleman--he told me
he was not a gendarme by metier, but a volunteer--and, although he
put me through practically the same paces, it was different. He was
sympathetic, not averse to a joke, and, when it was over, he went out
to help me into my baby cart, thanked me for troubling myself,
assured me that I was absolutely en regle, and even went so very far
as to say that he was pleased to have met me. So I suppose, until the
commander at Esbly is changed, I shall be left in peace.

This will give you a little idea of what it is like here. I suppose I
needed to be shaken up a bit to make me realize that I was near
the war. It is easy to forget it sometimes.

Amelie came this morning with the tale that it was rumored that all
foreigners were to be "expelled from the zone des armees." It might
be. Still, I am not worrying. "Sufficient to the day," you know.

XVI

September 8, 1915

You have the date quite right.

It is a year ago today--this very 8th of September--since I saw the
French soldiers march away across the hill, over what we call the
"Champs Madame"--no one knows why--on their way to the battle
behind Meaux.

By chance--you could not have planned it, since the time it takes a
letter to reach me depends on how interesting the censor finds it--
your celebration of that event reached me on its anniversary.

You are absolutely wrong, however, to pull such a long face over my
situation. You write as if I had passed through a year of misery. I have
not. I am sure you never got that impression from my letters, and I
assure you that I am writing exactly as I feel--I have no facade up for
you.

I own it has been a year of tension. It has been three hundred and
sixty-five days and a fourth, not one of which has been free from
anxiety of some sort or other. Sometimes I have been cold.
Sometimes I have been nervous. But all the same, it has been fifty-
two weeks of growing respect for the people among whom I live, and
of ever-mounting love of life, and never-failing conviction that the sum
of it is beauty. I have had to fight for the faith in that, but I have kept
it. Always "In the midst of life we are in Death," but not always is death
so fine and beautiful a thing as in these days. No one would choose
that such things as have come to pass in the last year should be, but
since they are, don't be so foolish as to pity me, who have the chance
to look on, near enough to feel and to understand, even