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_To Edward M.House_ October 11, 1914.
DEAR HOUSE: There is absolutely nothing to write.

It's war, war, war all the time; no change of subject; and, if you changed with your tongue, you couldn't change in your thought; war, war, war--"for God's sake find out if my son is dead or a prisoner"; rumours--they say that two French generals were shot for not supporting French, and then they say only one; and people come who have helped take the wounded French from the field and they won't even talk, it is so horrible; and a lady says that her own son (wounded) told her that when a man raised up in the trench to fire, the stench was so awful that it made him sick for an hour; and the poor Belgians come here by the tens of thousands, and special trains bring the English wounded; and the newspapers tell little or nothing--every day's reports like the preceding days'; and yet nobody talks about anything else.
Now and then the subject of its settlement is mentioned--Belgium and Serbia, of course, to be saved and as far as possible indemnified; Russia to have the Slav-Austrian States and Constantinople; France to have Alsace-Lorraine, of course; and Poland to go to Russia; Schleswig-Holstein and the Kiel Canal no longer to be German; all the South-German States to become Austrian and none of the German States to be under Prussian rule; the Hohenzollerns to be eliminated; the German fleet, or what is left of it, to become Great Britain's; and the German colonies to be used to satisfy such of the Allies as clamour for more than they get.
Meantime this invincible race is doing this revolutionary task marvellously--volunteering; trying to buy arms in the United States (a Pittsburgh manufacturer is now here trying to close a bargain with the War Office!)[78]; knitting socks and mufflers; taking in all the poor Belgians; stopping all possible expenditure; darkening London at night; doing every conceivable thing to win as if they had been waging this war always and meant to do nothing else for the rest of their lives-and not the slightest doubt about the result and apparently indifferent how long it lasts or how much it costs.
Every aspect of it gets on your nerves.

I can't keep from wondering how the world will seem after it is over--Germany (that is, Prussia and its system) cut out like a cancer; England owning still more of the earth; Belgium--all the men dead; France bankrupt; Russia admitted to the society of nations; the British Empire entering on a new lease of life; no great navy but one; no great army but the Russian; nearly all governments in Europe bankrupt; Germany gone from the sea--in ten years it will be difficult to recall clearly the Europe of the last ten years.