In all this, Dick was going from depth to depth of discouragement. Inveterate believer that he was in this town, which he had come so to love, in the country in whose institutions he so believed, doubt and despair of the outcome of the great undertaking grew upon him. We were not going to be able to handle even the physical side of it. It was not alone what he saw at home; it was what he heard from his friends in Washington. Their letters, once hopeful, became despairing. "It looks to me to-day," one of them wrote him along in the middle of January, "as if the whole war machine had broken down. I have believed and believed, but the fact is we are not getting men over. It's all nonsense about our having 400,000 on the other side; there are not over 100,000. It's all nonsense about our building ships--the whole business is simply tangled up. It's an awful, humiliating failure, I am afraid, Dick. The men at the top are camouflaging the whole situation. I cannot endure it that we men back here should fail the fine fellows who gave themselves so utterly, so fearlessly." This letter was the last straw to Dick's despair. He was overwhelmed with the futility of all the gigantic effort, sickened by the inability of Sabinsport properly to even take care of its own in a stress of weather, sickened by what he saw in the camp. Sabinsport was failing, the camp was failing, the country was failing. And why should he expect anything else? What was the human race, after all, but a set of selfish, limited bunglers? And so, night after night, he tossed and groaned, and slept fitfully. Things grinned at him. He wakened feverish and worn. In the day things said, "What's the use? Why talk about democracy? Why talk about ideals?" And he? Why, he was an utter failure. To get into it, to have a turn in the trenches, to be soaked with filth, to be broken with fatigue, to struggle to his feet, to feel a blessed death wound--that, that was the only thing that would count. He worked, of course; wore every day his mask of courage and good cheer; but day by day it was growing harder to keep it on. Day by day his strength was failing, for Dick, for the first time in his life, was recklessly disobeying the boundaries which had been set for his physical existence. The over-fatigue which he had always conscientiously avoided he not only sought but coveted; the strains which he had been told might at any time be fatal to him, he took almost gladly. Finally his friends among the physicians at the camp warned him, "You will break down, Ingraham, as sure as the world if you don't take things easier." His friends grew worried. Nancy came to him and begged him to stop, to go away for a while; but he laughed at them all. In the bitterness of his soul he had come to feel that here was his way out; he could give himself here.