As to your “War Mother” poem, I hesitate to tell you how much I like it, because I am afraid you may think I am trying to flatter you. It certainly is the best poem you ever wrote--beautiful, original and well sustained. I have seen no recent war verse I like so well. There is no question but what you will sell it to some good magazine. I certainly congratulate you, and congratulate the magazine fortunate enough to print your poem. I am very glad to hear of the deserved success your songs made at Lakewood, and in general of your triumphs at the Dickens Fellowship, and elsewhere. I wish I could have witnessed them, but I will be seeing more of the same sort next winter. That is what we like to hear about over here--triumphs and celebrations, and in general the pleasant and prosperous course of civilian life. Of course we soldiers are undergoing hardships and privations--we expect to, but we don’t spend our time advertising them. But in the States when you find they must do without quite as much wheat, or meat, or something of the sort, instead of just going without and keeping their mouths shut, they advertise their remarkable abstention by having “wheatless days” and “meatless days,” and all that sort of hysterical rubbish, and fill the papers with the news, thereby disgusting us soldiers and undoubtedly comforting the enemy. I think I will start a “strawberryless, ice creamless, sodaless day” for the army. It would be as sensible as what the people at home have been doing. If you (I don’t mean you personally, of course) have to eat hardtack instead of butter-raised biscuits, why eat the hardtack and shut up about it, but don’t be such an ass as to have a “butter-raised biscuitless Monday,” and don’t shut down on theatres and amusements; and don’t deprive people of their honest drink. Merely making stay-at-homes dismal does not help the soldiers a bit. England’s early “Business as Usual” scheme was more practicable, and this is something of a concession for me to make. There is quite a sermon on economics for you! Kindly read it to my father, whom it will edify and instruct. A recent letter from him shows that he utterly misunderstands my point of view on this subject, the result of lamentably careless reading by him of one of my letters in which I contrasted the gaiety and common-sense of the French, through years of starvation and ruin, with the wail which a little self-denial brought from the States. Send your picture soon. Affectionately yours, JOYCE. * * * * * May 27th, 1918. Dear Mother, I presume by this time you have received the humorous photographs of myself I sent you.