go all right, but because I want to have my heart free before I leave.

In order to keep calm and confident, pray:

For you, that you may continue your work with all the strength of the spirit;

For me, that my physical and moral strength will increase. So in this way we shall be in communication, without the aid of letters.

I shall carry your little New Testament as a reminder of you.

BEFORE THIAUMONT1

We left the fortress at one o'clock in the afternoon, and the next day at nine P. M. we occupied our first lines; the last part of the journey taking place on the plain, where we had to stoop at every rocket.

Arriving at dawn near the first line, we had to wait until night before advancing over the plain, and we passed all that day, under a beating rain, crouching in shell holes without any comforts or cover, heavy with the thickest and stickiest mud you could possibly imagine.

There we were nearer the spot where the shells were falling, and there were several casualties-light wounds, for the most.

Our situation has nothing, absolutely nothing, terrible about it. We are quiet, and the days pass in talk about the various amusements to be found here.

My spirits and health perfect. Happy to share in defending V-.

Did I tell you that night before last we were a little disturbed by tear shells and that finally we had to put on our masks? We took advantage of the night to dig communication trenches and to deepen our sham trench.

The corpses, more or less badly buried, are now giving out odors that are slightly unpleasant. But one gets used to everything, and doesn't think of them.

Without going into details, I can tell you that to-day has been quite active on both sides, as far as artillery goes, and that German shells of large calibre have apparently made regrettable gaps in another company.

Thiaumont is on the right bank of the Meuse. At the cost of enormous efforts day and night during the month of February, the Germans seemed about to attain their object in July. But, in fact, they were on the eve of a final check to their progress.

Good courage, faith and confidence. Thanks for all your kindness that always follows me, and which I feel constantly

near me.

There was something new yesterday: a regiment, supported by Moroccan sharpshooters, in our position, took the first line of German trenches.

This little affair makes three times that we have been under fire. The last broke out as soon as the first trench was taken: shells of small calibre and time shells particularly. We were crouched down in a narrow communication trench. Talking about projectiles, I have just received a clump of earth on my stomach, and the blow was a gentle one.

Last night I was told off to question a German prisoner, a huge peasant mobilized as a stretcher-bearer. We understood each other pretty well. There was one amusing incident: when I asked if he were not a corporal, he replied at once that he was a Catholic-a fact that evidently was very important under the circumstances.

I am in such good spirits that I have no feeling of care or fear under fire, and I am surprised at the absolute calm one quickly attains when one is confident.

Yesterday afternoon the Germans sent us a bombardment unbelievably heavy. It began with single shells of big calibre, and the firing increased in intensity until it reached its maximum-something infernal, shells whizzing and bursting everywhere.

Curiously enough, our company came out without any losses from this little game; I was not even touched, but just missed it. . . . A 77, a shell of small calibre, dug a hole scarcely a metre away from the spot where I was sitting with a comrade. For a moment I thought I was wounded. Altogether, there were the slightest kind of scratches behind my right ear and a little scratch (like a pin prick) on my right arm.

Another 77 dropped behind the parapet against which we were leaning.

That night we feared an attack, and they sent us into the first line, under the shells which had begun to fall again. Then it quieted down.

Then rain joined in, and we were trickling with water and stuck in a gluey and thick mud, until we were relieved last night.

A few days' rest and all the strain of this time will seem

little. We have done our work and we can look forward to a well-earned rest before changing sector.

Always courage and serenity. I knew that all would go well, and I was not mistaken.

REST AT VERDUN

July 19th. When the other day I was curious enough to glance at the spot where the 77 shell scratched me, I noticed a slight puffiness of the skin, and soon I had pulled out by means of a pin this minute splinter which I put in my letter as a souvenir of Thiaumont. It must be acknowledged that that was getting off easy, when an entire shell burst so near.

July 22d.

In a few days it will be four months that I have been at the front. Of the three friends who left together, X, Y and I, I am the only representative, the other two having garnered "good wounds" such as make so many envious. For my part I have the conviction that I shall keep sound to the end, and I continue to enjoy the completest freedom of spirit and an inner equilibrium that no circumstance can shake.

[To be continued]

AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT

BY A. MAURICE LOW

As an Englishman of long residence in the United States, I am a man, not without a country, but without politics; who has had abundant opportunities to judge what your country has done since it joined hands with mine against the mad beast of Europe, and so I may claim to be in a position to appraise without bias American achievements.

The majority of your people have shown a natural inpatience because days, weeks and months passed with the promise of what was going to be done some time in the indefinite future but with accomplishment still unrealized; and, to be quite honest, that feeling until a short time ago was shared by our people and the French, although they were polite enough or perhaps it would be more truthful to say politic enough-not openly to say what they thought. "America has not come up to our expectations," an English friend recently wrote me, and he went on to say it was greatly to be regretted that America had not profited by our mistakes and was repeating the blunders we made in the early days of the war, when without heavy guns and scant equipment and a scarcity of ammunition we were holding the Germans back from Paris and the Channel Ports.

It was quite true, I wrote my friend, America had not come up to English expectations, but I told him America had not come up to her own expectations, and the reason was simple. On our side of the Atlantic we had profound faith in the miracle of America. Your growth, your strength, your resources were so astounding they were little short of miraculous. There was nothing you could not do when necessity required, so we accepted with a certitude born of our faith-a faith we gladly embraced because it was the consolation of our hopes-the miracle of America. Old methods were to be scrapped, new devices were to bring the

war to a speedy close; our war-worn generals tired, their task too heavy and grown stale, were to be reinvigorated by the new and virile spirit of the West.

On your side you believed this no less than we, only you didn't call it a miracle-that would have savored too much of the theatrical. Mr. Bryan's sincere but misguided belief that America did not need a large standing army, because in case of danger a million men would spring to arms over night, laughed at as the delusion of a well-meaning but unpractical idealist, was, after all, typical of American temperament. If an army had to be raised it was only necessary for the President to issue his proclamation and, behold, the earth would tremble with the tread of the armed legions. It was the same faith, not less in Europe than in America, that encouraged us after the declaration of war to believe American inventive genius would over night discover the means to put the submarine out of business. For three years the best brains of England, France, and Italy, their scientists, naval men, and inventors, had labored incessantly but unsuccessfully, but Mr. Edison having retired to the top of a high mountain would work the miracle. I do not say this in a spirit of levity; on the contrary, it is evidence of the high courage and determination of the American people, qualities which make it certain America will be the great, if not the greatest, factor in winning the war; for America knows no failure and will not concede there is anything which its inventive genius and resolution cannot achieve. If the submarine cannot be defeated in one way, it can and will be in another. It is in that spirit America entered the war, and it is in that spirit America will go on with the war until Germany is broken.

When your country declared war most Americans, I think, to use the terminology of the diamond, believed that it was a tie in the ninth inning with the home team at bat and the winning run in their keeping. Germany and the Allies had fought to a stalemate; on sea the Allies were victorious, but on land neither side was strong enough to dislodge the other. America was to turn the scale, she was to do it with her money and her supplies rather than with her men, and the end was in sight. It came as a shock to most people to learn, as they did learn a few months later, that instead of the war being almost over it was, in fact, entering on a new phase; that Germany was no less strong in the summer