Isn’t it absurd that after two years’ interval I should again be passing the 14th of July in the United States? Only, this time you aren’t here and there’s not the slightest chance of our running into each other. I wonder if I should find you changed after all this time! Perhaps I shouldn’t know you any more now that you have shaved off your moustache in order to be like your brother-officers--you must have done it for swank, old man, since you got into the Navy List, but it won’t go down with me! Nor am I the skinny little chap you used to knock about to see if I could keep my end up. I have a beard like a missionary and my fiancée says that I have got stouter and that now I look like a man. So much for my appearance. As for the rest, it’s even worse. You can well believe that two years of hard labour like that we have had on the _Pamir_--and all that we have seen and all that we have heard--such things steady the head. At La Rochelle they listened to me as if I were an oracle, even the old people, which is quite different from what it was two years ago. Look here! I’ve pondered a little, and I now have my own opinions! Before, I was just happy-go-lucky, I didn’t care a hang for anything, I found everything perfectly simple as long as I had something to eat and my feet high and dry on the bridge if we were shipping heavy seas. Now I see more clearly the whys and the wherefores. I find life’s more complicated, and there are even times when I really think I might be quite at sea if I had to run the war myself. It’s age coming--maturity, as they call it. And so, alas, I realize that the more it goes on the more things will multiply and increase in difficulty until, if I ever have any real responsibilities, I shall be much too ancient and too concerned with a lot of considerations which will hinder me from acting. After two years of war, there is one conclusion of which I am sure: All the top men and Grand Panjandrums are too old, and what disgusts me is that it’s ten to one I’ll become like them. Everyone isn’t like Fourgues, who will soon be fifty and who can decide in five seconds because he is willing to take responsibility. But for one like that there are a hundred nonentities, and the country is suffering from it. You will wonder if I am having the blues because I tell you this nonsense instead of the story of the _Pamir_, which, you say, amuses you. The 14th of July far from France, without a chum with whom to yarn--it gives me the hump. Fourgues and Villiers--who are really good fellows--tried to distract me at a music-hall in Baltimore, but I was bored. And then, hang it all----But I won’t go on. Let’s get back to the subject.