If it were but possible to show those ninety millions one battlefield with its sprawling dead, its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self, I think then—­no, they wouldn’t be afraid.  Fear isn’t the emotion one feels—­they would experience the shame of living when so many have shed their youth freely.  This war is a prolonged moment of exultation for most of us—­we are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes.  To lay down one’s life for one’s friend once seemed impossible.  All that is altered.  We lay down our lives that the future generations may be good and kind, and so we can contemplate oblivion with quiet eyes.  Nothing that is noblest that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the simplest men out here to-day.  They may die childless, but their example will father the imagination of all the coming ages.  These men, in the noble indignation of a great ideal, face a worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted.  Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured.  And again other men step forward to take their places well knowing what will be their fate.  Bodies may die, but the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its way.  The battened souls of America will die and be buried.  I believe the decision of the next few days will prove to be the crisis in America’s nationhood.  If she refuses the pain which will save her, the cancer of self-despising will rob her of her life.

This feeling is strong with us.  It’s past midnight, but I could write of nothing else to-night.

God bless you.

Yours ever,
Con.