I didn’t get your letter expressing enthusiastic approval of “Rouge Bouquet” until I had received two others just mentioning it. I certainly am glad the poem “got” you, as it got me. The Regiment--and soldiers outside the Regiment as high as a Brigadier General--are wonderfully enthusiastic. The Brigadier General had twenty-four copies made to send his friends. Of course we are especially moved by it because the event is so close to us. But to appreciate it you should have heard taps played and at a soldier’s funeral. P. C. ought to know the distinction between peacemakers and pacifists. I wonder he didn’t include St Michael in his catalogue of pacifists. We are peace-makers, we soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives to bring back peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of France, whom anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the last six months) must pity and admire and love. They are an invaded people--and invaded people _always are right_. The careful study of certain ghostly villages (I cannot forget them) has taught me where I would have stood in the 60’s and that is on the side of the invaded Southern States. God keep me from ever being ordered to take part in an invasion of a peaceful land! So long as I am helping drive out the invader, I know I’m right--and all questions of international politics are of no importance whatever. Here are nice old ladies, fat babies, jovial humorous men, and little girls just after making their First Communions. They’ve been driven out of their pretty sleepy little villages. They want to get back and mend the shell holes in the roof and go to school and take their place drinking red wine of an evening according to their tastes and ages. Well, we men of the 69th are helping to give these people back their homes--and perhaps to prevent our homes from one day being taken from us by the same Power--of whom nothing at all worse need be said than that it is an invader. And St. Patrick and St. Bridgid and St. Columkill and all the other Saints are with us--they are no more pacifists than they are Roycrofters! And God keep us from Washington Square! No Man’s Land is a damn sight healthier place--I have tried both, and I know what I’m talking about. And as for you, you young flippertigibbet, you won’t be middle-aged, you say? Well, we’ll see about that! I’ll probably come back with one eye, one arm, one leg and a horrible temper, and turn your hair white in a day. Stop calling any child of ours “Billy.” When you referred to “Billy” in previous letters I thought you meant some rather unfortunately named dog or cat. Now I am annoyed to find out you meant Michael. The habit of so designating him probably started humorously--please stop it at once.