Where was the good in replying at all?
Silence is almost always the best reply in these cases.

Next came a letter from another English stranger, in which the writer announced having just read The Pentecost of Calamity.

Not a word of friendliness for what I had said about the righteousness of England's cause or my expressed unhappiness over the course which our Government had taken--nothing but scorn for us all and the hope that we should reap our deserts when Germany defeated England and invaded us.
Well?
What of it?
Here was a stricken person, writing in stress, in a land of desolation, mourning for the dead already, waiting for the next who should die, a poor, unstrung average person, who had not long before read that remark of our President's made on the morrow of the Lusitania: that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight; had read during the ensuing weeks those notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief Magistrate to a verbal slinking away and sitting down under it.

Can you wonder?
If the mere memory of those days of our humiliation stabs me even now, I need no one to tell me (though I have been told) what England, what France, felt about us then, what it must have been like for Americans who were in England and France at that time.

No: the average person in great trouble cannot rise above the trouble and survey the truth and be just.