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#76 Navy #3247 (Military Govt) FPO San Francisco 18 December 1944 9 pm My darling, Tonight I felt just like writing you a long letter, and wanted to especially because of my meager note of the past two or three days - but I felt that I ought to get off copies of the enclosed Christmas “Cards” so that they’d arrive before the holiday season was too far advanced, and here it is almost bedtime. Last night and the night before I was up late (10 or 10:30) and am moderately tired. Well sweetie - Merry Christmas, anyhow! There's just a slight chance that this may reach you in time; more likely it will come just after, at the very time I'm wondering whether you liked your presents, whether you've written me about Christmas yet…if so, and the little round of excitement (however modest this year) is over, you’re due for something of a letdown. So perhaps it's best if you get this then, just to remind you, my dearest, that it's natural, inevitable - and won't last forever. And there'll be the visit to Mrs. Conrad in two or three days! How eager I am for you to make the trip, and especially just at this time. Going to the movies two nights in a row out here is no good for me - it takes me too far away from you, since I've little time to stop and [pg 2] write or even think much during the day. It isn't that there's anything so pressing to do, tho there are lots of small details - I've mentioned that Johnny Reifsnider feels as tho his work here was virtually over two months ago, and is thoroughly fed up by now - but that it's important for me to keep busy for a lot of reasons, one of which is the necessity for keeping and developing common sense, a sense of proportion and alertness both to small facts and basic ones in a place like this. As we have been commenting tonight in between writing and censoring letters, Civil Affairs (the men out here still call it that) is such an amorphous, rather spineless undertaking as thus far conceived that both those who are in it and thousands who aren't are bored with or contemptuous of it. Basic policies are not clarified, nobody knows what's up; talent is wasted or misapplied and lack of it overworked. Still, to some extent it is fertile ground for individual initiative, and by and large (discounting the fact that there are twice as many CA men as are needed here) the community is well run and is taking shape - to what future end we don't now know. But what is important to me or us personally is that I am currently gaining from the experience and won't exhaust its possibilities as [pg 3] such for perhaps another two months. Don't be too sensitive to the radio or the newspapers, darling. Remember that the tone of events as reported fluctuates as much as your moods and mine, taking the latter as apart from those world events or progress toward the peace - I have a certain faith, not over-sanguine but substantial, in the ultimate outcome of this war, and again as to us personally I remind you that we will be together before you know it and that then a lot of things which seem no to matter so greatly, which weigh upon you and whose settlement seems to depend in part on your own measure of suffering through them, will become simply objective issues and not personal burdens. In both cases the world will be working away, whether we like it or not. In both cases it's up to us to live our lives as fully as we can. Dearly beloved, you and Wendy are more precious to me than anything else in the world - “I could not love honor half so much loved I not thee much more” (to set the bastard poet, brittle rimer that he was, to rights). But “honor” sounds too much like a blaze of glory, or like the smooth marmoreal goddess of victory that Ehrenburg writes about (remember?) - Integrity is a rougher and a better word. Yes, I am thinking about our own future, too. My cordial good wishes to Mrs. Conrad. Goodnight, darling Warren
