I found your letter dated September 25—in reply to my first one mailed after the battle. I am shocked to hear that I was spectacular. I did not mean to be. I apologize. Please imagine me very red in the face and feeling a little bit silly. I should not mind your looking on me as a heroine and all those other names you throw at me if I had had time to flee along the roads with all I could save of my home on my back, as I saw thousands doing.
But I cannot pick up your bouquets, considering that all I had to do was "sit tight" for a few days, and watch—at a safe distance—a battle sweep back. All you must say about that is "she did have luck." That's what I say every day.
As our railway communication is to be cut again, I am hurrying this off, not knowing when I can send another. But as you see, I have no news to write—just words to remind you of me, and say that all is well with me in this world where it is so ill for many.
V
November 7, 1914
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.