I am writing this letter in the end of one of our barracks, which its partition cuts to make an airy office for the Supply Sergeant of Headquarters Company. You’d like him very much--a very beautiful person of about my age, a playwright by profession, educated in Paris. At the other end of the long table sits a bridge party, of which the members are the Supply Sergeant (Lemist Esler is his name), Howard Young (who was a Marine before he became a fighting Irisher), Sergeant Kenneth Russell (a wealthy and charming business man of very literary taste, who knows most of the living poets we know and revels in the Oxford Book of English Verse), and Tom O’Kelly, who has the most beautiful tenor voice you ever heard. He is a professional singer from Dublin, with very tightly curled close-cropped hair, a reddish brown face, and the build of a prize-fighter. In the lulls of the game he sings snatches of “Digging for Gould” and other nice ballads. Admirable person. [Illustration: “HE LIES BURIED, ON THE RIGHT, BESIDE LIEUTENANT OLIVER AMES, AT THE EDGE OF A LITTLE COPSE KNOWN AS THE WOOD OF THE BURNED BRIDGE, CLOSE TO THE PURLING OURCQ” ] I am with the Regiment now--the Intelligence Section is back from its Post, the beautiful place from which I wrote you many letters. Now we are in very flat country, the flattest I ever saw. Very violent flowers, chiefly scarlet poppies and small blue things, cornflowers, I believe. Gloriously hot, with good swimming nearby, and the best sort of shower-bath, obtainable by merely sitting under the spout of a pump while an obliging friend turns the handle. Your letter of May twenty-sixth came after I had received a June letter. I am delighted to hear of Kenton’s confirmation and of his choice of a name--St. Stephen is a gallant gentleman and a true friend and does wonderful things for me. I’m not very enthusiastic about that group picture of office-workers in which I appear--I like myself better as I am now, a soldier instead of a clerk, visiting the office only occasionally--to work on my history. And I’m ever so much happier now than when the picture was taken. Is Kenton serving Mass yet? _Please_ have him do so. And please send me my Anthology--I believe restrictions no longer keep packages from soldiers. I love you. JOYCE. MISCELLANEOUS PIECES A BALLAD OF NEW SINS PRELUDE I am sick of the riotous roses of rapture, Of sibilant serpentine lips, Of the wine cup And murder And all that mid-Victorian stuff. I will sin large purple sins American And new. I THE SIN OF SOUTH BEND