Lenore, I remember your appeal to me.  Shall I ever forget your sweet face—­your sad eyes when you bade me hope in God?—­I am trying, but I do not see God yet.  Perhaps that is because of my morbidness—­my limitations.  Perhaps I will face him over there, when I go down into the Valley of the Shadow.  One thing, however, I do begin to see is that there is a divinity in men.  Slowly something divine is revealing itself to me.  To give up work, property, friends, sister, mother, home, sweetheart, to sacrifice all and go out to fight for country, for honor—­that indeed is divine.  It is beautiful.  It inspires a man and lifts his head.  But, alas! if he is a thinking man, when he comes in contact with the actual physical preparation for war, he finds that the divinity was the hour of his sacrifice and that, to become a good soldier, he must change, forget, grow hard, strong, merciless, brutal, humorous, and callous, all of which is to say base.  I see boys who are tender-hearted, who love life, who were born sufferers, who cannot inflict pain!  How many silent cries of protest, of wonder, of agony, must go up in the night over this camp!  The sum of them would be monstrous.  The sound of them, if voiced, would be a clarion blast to the world.  It is sacrifice that is divine, and not the making of an efficient soldier.

I shall write you endlessly.  The action of writing relieves me.  I feel less burdened now.  Sometimes I cannot bear the burden of all this unintelligible consciousness.  My mind is not large enough.  Sometimes I feel that I am going to be every soldier and every enemy—­each one in his strife or his drifting or his agony or his death.  But despite that feeling I seem alone in a horde.  I make no friends.  I have no way to pass my leisure but writing.  I can hardly read at all.  When off duty the boys amuse themselves in a hundred ways—­going to town, the theaters, and movies; chasing the girls (especially that to judge by their talk); play; boxing; games; and I am sorry to add, many of them gamble and drink.  But I cannot do any of these things.  I cannot forget what I am here for.  I cannot forget that I am training to kill men.  Never do I forget that soon I will face death.  What a terrible, strange, vague thrill that sends shivering over me!  Amusement and forgetfulness are past for Kurt Dorn.  I am concerned with my soul.  I am fighting that black passion which makes of me a sleepless watcher and thinker.

If this war only lets me live long enough to understand its meaning!  Perhaps that meaning will be the meaning of life, in which case I am longing for the unattainable.  But underneath it all must be a colossal movement of evolution, of spiritual growth—­or of retrogression.  Who knows?  When I ask myself what I am going to fight for, I answer—­for my country, as a patriot—­for