or twice up and down the room..)

I've had another letter.

DR. JONATHAN. This morning?

ASHER. No--I got it before I left for Washington. But I didn't bring it
in to you I wanted to think about it.

(He draws the letter, together with a folded paper, from his pocket,
and lays the paper down on the bench. Then he adjusts his glasses
and begins to read.)

"Dear dad,

"The sky is the colour of smeared charcoal. We haven't been in the
trenches long enough to evolve web feet, so mine are resting on a duck
board spread over a quagmire of pea soup. The Heinies are right here,
soaking in another ditch beyond a barbed wire fence, about the distance
of second base from the home plate. Such is modern war!

"But these aren't the things that trouble me. Last night, when I was wet
to the skin and listening to the shells--each singing its own song in the
darkness--I was able to think with astonishing ease better than if I were
sitting at a mahogany desk in a sound proof room! I was thinking over
the talk we had the day I left home,--do you remember it?--about the real
issue of this war. I've thought of it time and again, but I've never
written you about it. Since I have been in France I have had a liberal
education gathered from all sorts and conditions of men. Right here in
the trench near me are a street car conductor, a haberdasher, a Swedish
farm hand, a grocery clerk, a college professor, a Pole from the Chicago
Stock Yards, an Irish American janitor of a New York apartment house, and
Grierson from Cleveland, whose father has an income of something like a
million a year. We have all decided that this is a war for the under
dog, whether he comes from Belgium or Armenia or that so-called land of
Democracy, the United States of America. The hope that spurs us on and
makes us willing to endure these swinish surroundings and die here in the
mud, if need be, is that the world will now be reorganized on some
intelligent basis; that Grierson and I, if we get back, won't have to rot
on a large income and petrified ideas, but will have some interesting and
creative work to do. Economic inequalities must be reduced, and those
who toil must be given a chance to live, not merely to exist. Their
lives must include a little leisure, comfortable homes, art and beauty
and above all an education that none of us, especially those of us who
went to universities, never got,--but which now should be available for
all.

"The issue