. 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 Amelie 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 I 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 th