Yesterday your paper came to me, sent forward from my home. For the last four months it has come to me through change of camp and bullets, the delays of censorship, and the uncertainties of civil and military posts. And each time it has provoked me, and tonight, as I read it in the flickering obscurity of my hut, it provokes me excessively. For I am a soldier and my life is the immemorial life of soldiers. That is to say it is the life of a barbarian; of an antique legionary; of a serf of the Middle Age; of those that fought before the Arts were born of leisure and the life of cities. I am a soldier and live according to the ancient lore of camps: incessant occupation and equally unceasing tedium; recurring orgies of physical exertion prolonged to the verge of utter exhaustion; an inexorable discipline that is with classic exactness termed blind; the constant and elementary hardships of animal existence experienced in forms unmitigated by any of the devices of civilization; above all, a complete and almost splendid intellectual vacuity, a complete and almost splendid indifference to the customary enthusiasms and inclinations of a life outside the armies: these are the chief elements that shape the life of a soldier on active service and these are the influences amongst which, throughout Europe, the men of my years are coming to maturity. That is why you provoke me, and your paper provokes me, and your contributors all provoke me when there is talk of the Arts. Our experiences are alien to each other; and Art is so completely a matter for man’s inner soul, for that inner soul wherein distil to essence the labors, sufferings and lusts of a man’s life and from which the deepest elements of individual character take form and color. As your quotation from de Gourmont puts it, there is a difference in our sensibility; and that difference lies in this: that we in Europe are soldiers. The other influences that separate us in sympathy are negligible, and spring solely from our different opportunities of acquaintance with the cults and works of contemporary schools and artists. But the military influence has turned the city of Art to a tower of Babel. We who are soldiers no longer understand the tongues that Art once spoke to us. The old language of unrest, of delicate eclecticism, of an indecision of taste that hungers by turn for the remotely archaic and the fantastically modern, is become unintelligible to us who amid the discipline and adventures of arms are learning new values for all the sacraments of life.