To Ralph W. Page

     London, April 13, 1918.

     DEAR RALPH: 

Your cheery letters about entertaining governors, planting trees and shrubbery and your mother’s little orchard give us much pleasure.  The Southern Pines paper brings news of very great damage to the peach crop.  I hope it is much exaggerated.  Is it?

We haven’t any news here, and I send you my weekly note only to keep my record clear.  The great battle—­no one talks or thinks of anything else.  We have suffered and still suffer a good deal of fear and anxiety, with real reason, too.  But the military men are reassuring.  Yet I don’t know just how far to trust their judgment or to share their hopes.  Certainly this is the most dangerous situation that modern civilization was ever put in.  If we can keep them from winning any great objective, like Paris or a channel port, we ought to end the war this year.  If not, either they win or at the least prolong the war indefinitely.  It’s a hazardous and trying time.

There were never such casualties on either side as now.  Such a bloody business cannot keep up all summer.  But before everybody is killed or a decisive conclusion is reached, the armies will, no doubt, dig themselves in and take a period of comparative rest.  People here see and feel the great danger.  But the extra effort now may come too late.  Still we keep up good hope.  The British are hard to whip.  They never give up.  And as for the French army, I always remember Verdun and keep my courage up.

The wounded are coming over by the thousand.  We are incomparably busy and in great anxiety about the result (though still pretty firm in the belief that the Germans will lose), and luckily we keep very well.

     Affectionately,
     W.H.P.

     To Ralph W. Page

     London, April 7, 1918.

     DEAR RALPH: 

There used to be a country parson down in Wake County who, when other subjects were talked out, always took up the pleasing topic of saving your soul.  That’s the way your mother and I do—­with the subject of going home.  We talk over the battle, we talk over the boys, we talk over military and naval problems, we discuss the weather and all the babies, and then take up politics, and talk over the gossip of the wiseacres; but we seldom finish a conversation without discussing going home.  And we reach just about as clear a conclusion on our topic as the country parson reached on his.  I’ve had the doctors going over me (or rather your mother has) as an expert accountant goes over your books; and I tried to bribe them to say that I oughtn’t to continue my arduous duties here longer.  They wouldn’t say any such thing.  Thus that device failed—­dead.  It looks as if I were destined for a green old age and no martyr business at all.