/* Lamb House, Rye. August 19th, 1914. */
Your letter of the 15th has come--and may this reach you as directly, though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long--the less that the irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as you express that it leaves _you_. I find it the strangest state to have lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_ somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn for luncheon--and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C. gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. I _go_ to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action--yet feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try to "work"--even if I _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_. _They_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my "taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I am your all-faithfully tender and true old