What a cheerless place the States must be these days! Don’t send me American papers (except the _Times Book Review_) for they depress me, showing me what a dismal land you live in. This meatless, wheatless day business is very wearying. It can do no earthly good--it is merely giving comfort to the enemy, who undoubtedly know all about it. I wish--aside from the obvious greatest reasons--that you were here in France--you’d like everything, but especially the gentle, kind, jovial, deeply pious people. Time enough--to resume--for wheatless days when the enemy takes your wheat. Until then, carpe diem!--that is, eat buckwheat cakes with plenty of syrup. I am disgusted with all I read in the American Magazines about the Americans in France. It is all so hysterical and all so untrue. It isn’t jealousy that makes me say this--I have no desire to compete with newspaper-correspondents--but it annoys me to see the army to which I belong and the country on and for whose soil we are fighting so stupidly misrepresented. I hope you received “Rouge Bouquet”--if you did receive it I know you liked it. General ---- (I forgot, I mustn’t name generals lower in rank than Major-Generals) had twelve copies of it made. I sent it to you two weeks ago--you should be receiving it now. The newspapers by now have re-revealed its meaning to you, if any explanation was needed. It was read at an evening entertainment at one of our camps at the front. Father Duffy read it, and taps was played on the cornet before and after. I couldn’t get down to hear it--I was further front, at work in the dug-out that night. I think most of my war book will be in verse. I prefer to write verse, and I can say in verse things not permitted to me in prose. You remember--no, probably you don’t--Coventry Patmore and his confessor. The confessor objected to the passionate explicitness of some of Coventry’s devotional poems--they dealt with things esoteric, he said, and should be set forth in Latin, not in the profane tongue. And Coventry replied that for most people poetry was an incomprehensible language, more hidden than Latin--or more hiding. And speaking of Coventry Patmore, the best way to fry potatoes is to have deep oil or butter violently boiling in a great pot, to slip the slices of potatoes into it and stir them persistently, never letting them touch the pot’s bottom, to lift them out (when they are golden brown) by means of a small sieve, and to place them on paper so that the grease may be absorbed. The best news I’ve had since I reached France is about Kenton’s medal. I’m going to write to-day and tell him so. I love you, JOYCE. * * * * * April 19, 1918. Dear Aline: My chief occupation at the present time is awaiting a letter from you.