When I Come Back

Teacher's account of an American soldier who was killed in France. * * * * * An excerpt from the beginning: One day in October, 1918, an American soldier sat in a "little pit" in a wood, writing a letter home. The principal thesis of his letter was jam, cited as "one of the most vital topics about camp now." There was also a good deal about a cup of apple sauce, lately given him by a princely comrade; the repairing of trousers with the aid of a housewife, also a recent gift; wool socks, rainy weather and the prospect of billets; something of small happenings at home. In concluding, the soldier apologized for the material thinness of his letter, saying: "Our days are uneventful, and 'there is nothing much to say." The "little pit" which the writer mentioned was an improvised dug-out. The "wood" he referred to flanked the Argonne Forest. The'' uneventful days'' were the days of the American offensive of September-November last: the colossal and terrible operation of our armies on the Meuse which, if Marshal Foch's word is worth anything, "broke the Boche's back," and which history is likely to record as one of the great decisive battles of all time. Soldiers' letters home come pitched in many keys. Much news, and that the most important, is beyond the censor's reach. We read manly soldier-letters and, occasionally, letters that are not so manly; letters buoyant and depressed, imaginative and prosaic, gushing and reserved; letters which are full of unconscious courage and abnegation, and letters — happily few in number — which show the catastrophe of the world conceived as but the sentimental theatre of one small soul. But the point of interest is that behind all the soldier-letters, each according to its kind, we seem to discern, often with great distinctness, the lineaments of the soldier himself. For war is a solvent, and few men can write a page in earnest without giving themselves away. What sort of man would it be, then, who was capable of writing, from the Argonne in October, the odd sentence quoted above? A dull man, perhaps, doomed to pass unstirred through stupendous scenes? Or a dumb man — seeing and feeling much, it may be, but unequal even to attempting the swamps of exposition? Or perhaps this was a born soldier, one of that stark company who, frightened and unhappy in a drawing-room, find the naturalness and ease of life released to them under the thunder of the guns? Or possibly, again, the quoted sentence is only a phrase, and other passages will pipe to a different tune?