In the old days on earth I once gave some study to the theory and practice of war, but that labor had little value in preparing me to study this war. Not only did it take for granted conditions that no longer exist, but my point of observation then was an imaginary station on one side or the other of an imaginary field; now I am really here, there and everywhere. I read the thoughts of the commanders on both sides, I am with the men in the trenches sometimes half-buried in mud and water, I am riding with the cavalry, I go forward with the guns of the artillery, I go out and up with the escaping spirits of the dead--go with them into the hell of confusion that almost always swallows them for a time after they are violently thrust from their bodies. Truly, “War is hell!” Have no glorious delusions to the contrary, you who dwell in the haunts of peace and babble of what you know not. The horrors do not end when the guns cease firing. The dark and silent night of rain is full of souls in bewilderment and torment. Often one will grope his way hither and thither, seeking to find a trench-mate to whom he had become attached in the _camaraderie_ of war--that sweet flower which grows upon an ugly stem. Often they live over and over again the rage and madness of the attack; they plunge an imaginary bayonet into the form of an imaginary foe; or, if a mass of them are together, and they generally are, they strike recklessly at anything before them, conscious always of an _opposing_ force. The General of whom I wrote in my last letter was a man of marked spiritual development; he soon broke away from the entanglements of matter; he was a devotee to whom his country was a god and his Emperor a hero to be followed with aspiration. But most men who die on the battlefields are common soldiers who fight because it is the will of the mass behind them. They generally go out into darkness for a time, and most of them wander in darkness and bewilderment for varying periods. Some, on the contrary, are vividly conscious almost from the hour of death. These may attack the men of the opposing army while they sleep. The dreams of the battlefields are terrible in their intensity. Sometimes again, for in the general confusion distinctions may be quite lost, souls that had believed themselves enemies cling together in the tragic yearning of the dark that separates the worlds of the “invisible.” In their great need they do not know their former friends from their former enemies. Another pale flower that grows from the ugly stem of war!