It has been one year since Brent left his family behind to go overseas and he reflects on their parting and updates James on where other family members in the service are now. He returned from a trip on horseback between the forest of Argonne and Verdun, which is a landscape he can hardly describe but he wishes his father could have seen it. There isn't a patch of ground that hasn't been torn up by shellfire and littered with the debris of four years of war. He describes the ravaged landscape in poetic detail and reflects on the totality of destruction and its implications. He directs anger at the retreating Germans and writes "even in their defeat they are haughty, arrogant, untrustworthy, and hateful," and emphasizes that terms of peace "must grind down and crush hope and life in present German generations" in order to teach them humility and avoid another devastating war.
All rights for this image are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Requests to publish, redistribute, or replicate this material should be addressed to Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
Contact host institution for more information.