down to the
bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two
men who went to war and me who stayed behind.

Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very
bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.

Yes, letters pass between us. When I read their letters I try to imagine
their surroundings and the crass details of their life; the fir-trees of
the Argonne, the name of a regiment which I know by heart like a prayer,
frost-bitten feet, the incessant thunder, and the arrival of the postman
which draws us a little closer together. Then there is Carency--the
place makes no difference--the light cavalry.... Attack, formation, the
first rank mowed down, the second, the third; he alone standing upright
in the front of the fourth rank, a struggle lasting a century, the
confused subsidence, and my portrait snug under his blue jacket. And
that night last week when he was nearly dying of thirst and crawled out
over the open field, groping for something to drink. A miracle, a pool!
He fills his mess cup and empties it at one draught. He spits out thick
threads, they hang from his mouth--bits of brains.... A pool of human
blood from which he has quenched his thirst.

I receive a letter nearly every morning. The envelope burns in my
fingers: the written lines make a pretense of talking and telling you
things, as if I were not standing in front of him as you stand in front
of a window-pane which you frost with your breath so that you can't see
what's on the other side.

I write to them before I go to bed. Nothing important ever turns up, so
I make a lot of the little everyday affairs--what happens at the office
or at lunch in the restaurant where the people discuss and wrangle and
the smells turn you sick. I tell them how forlorn the house looks, and
how well the child is getting along in the country, that I do some work
after dinner to make a little more money. Besides, there's always some
anecdote to relate.... Twelve strokes cutting into the metallic
night.... Sometimes when I fold my letter I have a sense of having
written about somebody else.

Nevertheless, the thought of them is an obsession; it is a red point
about which I develop and revolve and add to myself.

And sometimes, too, when I shut my eyes, bizarre notions swoop down on
me, a horrid swarm of bats. "How many women are there to-night," I
wonder, "who are tossing about in the thin warmth of their beds,
distracted cre