idea how glad I was to get your letter.  I could sit here and write to you all day if they’d let me, but I’m a corporal now.  When you answer this, I wish you’d say how the old town looks and if the grass in the front yards is as green as it usually is, and everything.  And tell me some more about everything you think of when you are working down at the Red Cross like you said.  I guess I’ve read your letter five million times, and that part ten million.  I mean where you underlined that “you” and what you said to yourself at the Red Cross.  Oh, murder, but I was glad to read that!  Don’t forget about writing anything else you think of like that.

Well, I was interrupted then and this is the next day.  Of course, I can’t tell you where we are, because that darned censor will read this letter, but I guess he will let this much by.  Who do you think I ran across in a village yesterday?  Two boys from the old school days, and we certainly did shake hands a few times!  It was the old foolish Dutch Krusemeyer and Albert Paxton, both of them lieutenants.  I heard Fred Mitchell is still training in the States and about crazy because they won’t send him over yet.

If you had any idea how glad I was to get your letter, you wouldn’t lose any time answering this one.  Anyhow, I’m going to write to you again every few days if I get the chance, because maybe you’ll answer more than one of ’em.

But see here, cut out that “sent you to be killed” stuff.  You’ve got the wrong idea altogether.  We’ve got the big job of our lives, we know that, but we’re going to do it.  There’ll be mistakes and bad times, but we won’t fall down.  Now you’ll excuse me for saying it this way, Dora, but I don’t know just how to express myself except saying of course we know everybody isn’t going to get back home—­but listen, we didn’t come over here to get killed particularly, we came over here to give these Dutchmen h—­l!

Perhaps you can excuse language if I write it with a blank like that, but before we get back we’re going to do what we came for.  They may not all of them be as bad as some of them—­it’s a good thing you don’t know what we do, because some of it would make you sick.  As I say, there may be quite a lot of good ones among them; but we know what they’ve done to this country, and we know what they mean to do to ours.  So we’re going to attend to them.  Of course that’s why I’m here.  It wasn’t you.

Don’t forget to write pretty soon, Dora.  You say in your letter—­I certainly was glad to get that letter—­well, you say I have things to do more important than “girls.”  Dora, I think you probably know without my saying so that of course while I have got important things to do, just as every man over here has, and everybody at home, for that matter, well, the thing that is most important in the world to me, next to helping win this war, it’s reading the next letter from you.

Don’t forget how glad I’ll be to get it, and don’t forget you didn’t have anything to do with my being over here.  That was—­it was something else.  And you bet, whatever happens I’m glad I came!  Don’t ever forget that!