Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me, your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find, unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go straight on toward better and better....

Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors—and they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and near. The War blocks out of course—for that you have realised—every other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so far as one can "calmly" reflect, all that I see; on the contrary there is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful, or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all—which is difficult. I mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening.... You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations, precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort—so far as its Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done it as she first designed. The horrors of the crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods, haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail, and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,

H. J.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 31st, 1914.

Dearest L. C.

I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11 and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid these horrors—over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not disseminate, one's forces of resistance—to the prodigious public total of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually, and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, don't send me on newspapers—I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and live up to our neck in them; all the London morning ones by 8 a.m., and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just now very exhilarating—but I can only take things in in waiting silence—bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments, for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning. Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with real imagination and magnanimity, and above all with real material generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us, and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present—and if she should have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of you all faithfully and fondly.

Ever your old devotedest
H. J.