What a terrible desecration war is! You go out one week and look through your glasses at a green, smiling country-little churches, villages nestling among woods, white roads running across a green carpet; next week you see nothing but ruins and a country-side pitted with shell-holes. All night the machine guns tap like rivet-ting machines when a New York sky-scraper is in the building. Then suddenly in the night a bombing attack will start, and the sky grows white with signal rockets. Orders come in for artillery retaliation, and your guns begin to stamp the ground like stallions; in the darkness on every side you can see them snorting fire. Then stillness again, while Death counts his harvest; the white rockets grow fainter and less hysterical. For an hour there is blackness. My batman consoles himself with singing, "Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile." There's a lot in his philosophy--it's best to go on smiling even when some one who was once your pal lies forever silent in his blanket on a stretcher. The great uplifting thought is that we have proved ourselves men. In our death we set a standard which in ordinary life we could never have followed. Inevitably we should have sunk below our highest self. Here we know that the world will remember us and that our loved ones, in spite of tears, will be proud of us. What God will say to us we cannot guess--but He can't be too hard on men who did their duty. I think we all feel that trivial former failures are washed out by this final sacrifice. When little M. used to recite "Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself had said, 'This is my own, my native land,'" I never thought that I should have the chance that has now been given to me. I feel a great and solemn gratitude that I have been thought worthy. Life has suddenly become effective and worthy by reason of its carelessness of death. By the way, that Princeton man I mentioned so long ago was killed forty yards away from me on my first trip into the trenches. Probably G. M'C. and his other friends know by now. He was the first man I ever saw snuffed out. I'm wearing your mittens and find them a great comfort. I'll look forward to some more of your socks--I can do with plenty of them. If any of your friends are making things for soldiers, I wish you'd get them to send them to this battery, as they would be gratefully accepted by the men. I wish I could come to _The Music Master_ with you. I wonder how long till we do all those intimately family things together again. Good-bye, my dearest M. I live for home letters and am rarely disappointed. God bless you, and love to you all. Yours ever, CON. XXVI November 4th, 1916. My Dearest Mother: