IT was not until I got out my letter-book this morning that I realized
that I had let three weeks go by without writing to you. I have no
excuse to offer, unless the suspense of the war may pass as one.

We have settled down to a long war, and though we have settled
down with hope, I can tell you every day demands its courage.

The fall of Antwerp was accepted as inevitable, but it gave us all a
sad day. It was no use to write you things of that sort. You, I presume,
do not need to be told, although you are so far away, that for me,
personally, it could only increase the grief I felt that Washington had
not made the protest I expected when the Belgian frontier was
crossed. It would have been only a moral effort, but it would have
been a blow between the eyes for the nervous Germans.

All the words we get from the front tell us that the boys are standing
the winter in the trenches very well. They've simply got to--that is all
there is to that.

Amélie is more astonished than I am. When she first realized that
they had got to stay out there in the rain and the mud and the cold,
she just gasped out that they never would stand it.

I asked her what they would do then--lie down and let the Germans
ride over them? Her only reply was that they would all die. It is hard
for her to realize yet the resistance of her own race.

I am realizing in several ways, in a small sense, what the men are
enduring. I take my bit of daily exercise walking round my garden. I
always have to carry a trowel in my sweater pocket, and I stop every