XLVIII


February 5th, 1917.

My Dearest Mother:

Aren't the papers good reading now-a-days with nothing to record but
success? It gives us hope that at last, anyway before the year is out,
the war must end. As you know, I am at the artillery school back of the
lines for a month, taking an extra course. I have been meeting a great
many young officers from all over the world and have listened to them
discussing their program for when peace is declared. Very few of them
have any plans or prospects. Most of them had just started on some
course of professional training to which they won't have the energy to
go back after a two years' interruption. The question one asks is how
will all these men be reabsorbed into civilian life. I'm afraid the
result will be a vast host of men with promising pasts and highly
uncertain futures. We shall be a holiday world without an income. I'm
afraid the hero-worship attitude will soon change to impatience when the
soldiers beat their swords into ploughshares and then confess that they
have never been taught to plough. That's where I shall score--by beating
my sword into a pen. But what to write about--! Everything will seem so
little and inconsequential after seeing armies marching to mud and
death, and people will soon get tired of hearing about that. It seems as
though war does to the individual what it does to the landscapes it
attacks--obliterates everything personal and characteristic. A valley,
when a battle has done with it, is nothing but earth--exactly what it