My Dearest Lenore,—­If my writing is not very legible it is because my hand shakes when I begin this sweet and sacred privilege of writing to my promised wife.  My other letter was short, and this is the second in the weeks since I left you.  What an endless time!  You must understand and forgive me for not writing oftener and for not giving you definite address.

I did not want to be in the Western regiment, for reasons hard to understand.  I enlisted in New York and am trying hard to get into the Rainbow Division, with some hope of success.  There is nothing to me in being a member of a crack regiment, but it seems that this one will see action first of all American units.  I don’t want to be an officer, either.

How will it be possible for me to write you as I want to—­letters that will be free of the plague of myself—­letters that you can treasure if I never come back?  Sleeping and waking, I never forget the wonderful truth of your love for me.  It did not seem real when I was with you, but, now that we are separated, I know that it is real.  Mostly my mind contains only two things—­this constant memory of you, and that other terrible thing of which I will not speak.  All else that I think or do seems to be mechanical.

The work, the training, is not difficult for me, though so many boys find it desperately hard.  You know I followed a plow, and that is real toil.  Right now I see the brown fallow hills and the great squares of gold.  But visions or thoughts of home are rare.  That is well, for they hurt like a stab.  I cannot think now of a single thing connected with my training here that I want to tell you.  Yet some things I must tell.  For instance, we have different instructors, and naturally some are more forcible than others.  We have one at whom the boys laugh.  He tickles them.  They like him.  But he is an ordeal for me.  The reason is that in our first bayonet practice, when we rushed and thrust a stuffed bag, he made us yell, "God damn you, German—­die!" I don’t imagine this to be general practice in army exercises, but the fact is he started us that way.  I can’t forget.  When I begin to charge with a bayonet those words leap silently, but terribly, to my lips.  Think of this as reality, Lenore—­a sad and incomprehensible truth in 1917.  All in me that is spiritual, reasonable, all that was once hopeful, revolts at this actuality and its meaning.  But there is another side, that dark one, which revels in anticipation.  It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay.  I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades.  I fancied that I alone had suffered a retrogression.  I have a deep consciousness of baseness that is going to keep me aloof from them.  I seem to be alone with my own soul.  Yet I seem to be abnormally keen to impressions.  I feel what is going on in the soldiers’ minds, and it shocks