ourselves in uniform.  It’s a woman’s bazaar, to raise money for war-relief work and so on.  The hall is almost as large as that field back of your house, and every night it is packed with people, mostly young.  My comrades are having fun out of it, but I feel like a fish out of water.

Just the same, Lenore, I’m learning more every day.  If I was not so disgusted I’d think this was a wonderful opportunity.  As it is, I regard it only as an experience over which I have no control and that interests me in spite of myself.  New York is an awful place—­endless, narrow, torn-up streets crowded with hurrying throngs, taxicabs, cars, and full of noise and dust.  I am always choked for air.  And these streets reek.  Where do the people come from and where are they going?  They look wild, as if they had to go somewhere, but did not know where that was.  I’ve no time or inclination to see New York, though under happier circumstances I think I’d like to.

People in the East seem strange to me.  Still, as I never mingled with many people in the West, I cannot say truly whether Eastern people are different from Western people.  But I think so.  Anyway, while I was in Spokane, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles I did not think people were greatly concerned about the war.  Denver people appeared not to realize there was a war.  But here in New York everything is war.  You can’t escape it.  You see that war will soon obsess rich and poor, alien and neutral and belligerent, pacifist and militarist.  Since I wrote you last I’ve tried to read the newspapers sent to us.  It’s hard to tell you which makes me the sicker—­the prattle of the pacifist or the mathematics of the military experts.  Both miss the spirit of men.  Neither has any soul.  I think the German minds must all be mathematical.

But I want to write about the women and girls I see, here in New York, in the camps and towns, on the trains, everywhere.  Lenore, the war has thrown them off their balance.  I have seen and studied at close hand women of all classes.  Believe me, as the boys say, I have thought more than twice whether or not I would tell you the stark truth.  But somehow I am impelled to.  I have an overwhelming conviction that all American girls and mothers should know what the truth is.  They will never be told, Lenore, and most would never believe if they were told.  And that is one thing wrong with people.

I believe every soldier, from the time he enlists until the war is ended, should be kept away from women.  This is a sweeping statement and you must take into account the mind of him who makes it.  But I am not leaping at conclusions.  The soldier boys have terrible peril facing them long before they get to the trenches.  Not all, or nearly all, the soldiers are going to be vitally affected by the rottenness of great cities or by the mushroom hotbeds of vice springing up near the camps.  These evils exist and are being