ows
less in the way of facilities for diversion than the average town of
10,000 in the States.

[Sidenote: Mental privations hurt more than physical ones.]

Don't worry about my privations--"which mostly there ain't none." Such
as they are, they are necessary and unavoidable; and, above all, we are
fitted for them. You can't well sympathize with a man who is doing the
thing he has longed for and trained for all his life. Besides, physical
privations are nothing; it is the mental ones that hurt. A soldier in
the trenches, with little to eat and nothing but a hole to sleep in, can
feel happy all the same--particularly if life has something in prospect
for him if he lives. But a man out of work at home, sleeping in the park
and panhandling for food, is much more to be pitied, though his
immediate hardships may be no greater.

The weather over here is very passable at present, but they say it is
simply hell off the coast in winter. However, somebody said the war will
be over in November. I hope the Kaiser and Hindenburg know it, too!

JULY 26.

[Sidenote: Anxious to be in action.]

I haven't done anything heroic, which irks me. We would like to get in
on the ground floor, while all hands are in a receptive mood, and before
the Plattsburgers and other such death-defying supermen make it too
common.

JULY 22.

[Sidenote: A cheerful letter from home.]

Your two letters of July 7 and 8 came this afternoon, but I got the
latter first and expected from what you said in contrition that there
was hot stuff--gas-attack followed by bayonet-work--in the former;
therefore I was all the more ashamed to find you had dealt so leniently
and squarely with me. Why didn't you come back with a long invoice of
troubles of your own, as 99 per cent of women would? Evidently you are
the one-per-cent woman. I bitterly regretted my whines after having
written them, for their very untruth. Alas, how many people think the
world is drab-colored and life a failure, and so have done or said
something they regret all their lives, when a vegetable pill or a brisk
walk would have changed their vision completely! Why is it that people
sometimes deliberately hurt those they have loved most in the world? I
suppose it is because we are all really children at heart and want some
one else to cry too. The other day Smith shamefacedly abstracted from
the mail-box a letter to his wife, and tore it up, and I know--oh, I
know!

At a husbands' meeting