I’ve written lots of letters back home, but this is the first one of my own that I’ve had time for. I’m in the game, Brig, and I haven’t fumbled the ball. I live in a little tin shanty with a sand-bag roof, and I wear a little tin hat that holds just enough warm water to shave with. It held more—until lately; now there’s a hole in it that I wouldn’t trade for the Hudson “tube.” I was starting out with two cans of hot cocoa when the street was shelled. I spilled the boys’ cocoa and got a dent in my own, but those Bessemer derbies are certainly handy shock-absorbers. I woke up with my head in Dr. Peters’s lap. Right here I must make you acquainted with Pete. He’s a hundred-pound hymn-weevil, and the best all-round reverend that ever snatched a brand from the burning. He dragged me in under cover all alone, and he used no hooks. Pretty good for a guy his size, eh? Pete and I are partners in crime—and, say, the stuff we pull in this hut! Movies, theatricals, concerts, boxing-bees—with the half-portion reverend in every scrimmage. He’s a Syncopated Baptist, or an Episcopalian Elk, or something; anyhow, he’s nine parts human and one part divine. That’s the way the Y is wearing them over here. He’s got the pep, and the boys swear by him. When the war is over he hopes to get a little church somewhere, and I’m going to see that he does, if I have to buy it, for I want to hear him preach. I never have heard him, but I’ll bet he’s a bear. Take it from me, he’ll need a modest cathedral with about six acres of parking-space inside and a nail in the door for the S. R. O. sign.