“Come on, Jimmie.”

“Wait.”

“Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of you.  Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward.  It’s the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and go!

“Don’t be a buttonhole patriot!  A government that is good enough to live under is good enough to fight under!”

Cheers.

“If there is any reason on earth has manifested itself for this devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with the French army, and I’ve come home, now that my own country is at war, to give her every ounce of energy I’ve got to offer.  As soon as a hole in my side is healed up.  I’m going back to those trenches, and I want to say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put together.”

Cheers.

“I’ll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and take up my work again as a draftsman.  Why, I’ve seen weaklings and self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come out—­oh yes, plenty of them do come out—­men.  Men that have got close enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life means come over them.  Men that have gotten back their pep, their ambitions, their unselfishness.  That’s what war can do for your men, you women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of cheating their government.  That’s what war can do for your men.  Make of them the kind of men who some day can face their children without having to hang their heads.  Men who can answer for their part in making the world a safe place for democracy.”

An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly sown stars cropping out.  Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd.  His voice had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back, could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift for voice.

There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the exigency of uniform.

“Come on, Jimmie.  I—­I’m cold.”

They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes, down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that grew apace.

He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief wadded against her mouth.  He strode on with a scowl and his head bent.  “Let’s sit down in this little park, Jimmie.  I’m tired.”