Truly your
Son.
Dear Family:
A letter clipping describes that part of France which is shrouded in the historic pages of knights and kings; that part which has pleased me so much when written by another, makes me think of the poorer classes who have lived and died in the environment of their birthplaces without ambition, that those knights and kings might carve their deeds of blood on shields of gold.
In this great war, these poorer classes, peasants still, are the poilus who keep the trench mud from driving them mad by that pint of the red French wine, and they sit about me now in a little old wine shop whose many-colored bottles, oft refilled, are as numerous in shapes and styles as the decades they have served. The walls are spotted and stained, and the ceilings smoked, but the delicate moldings in the stone tell of a day when this was the thriving hostelry of the village. Now the poorly dressed, worn-out veterans of the Great War bend over the scarred tables and confer or wrangle as to how their work, so hard begun, will end.
Dinsmore.
February 18, 1918.
Dear Family:
I am told that the American captain at this school is looking for me to offer me a second lieutenancy in the U. S. Army. I must decide immediately, and I am tempted to toss a coin.