He told of his feeling for it.  “More than a showing up and a getting even, though there is that.  It will be no prancing steed and clanking saber picture of the army.  More digging of clay than waving of the flag.  I see significant things arising from that survival of autocracy in a democracy, an interesting study in the bitter things coming out of the relation of the forms and habits of a vanishing order to the aspirations and tendencies of a forming one.  And in that bending of spirit to form, the army codes and standards making for the army habit of mind, the army snobbishness and narrowness.  The things that shape men, until a given body of men have particular characteristics, particular limitations.  You said that if you loved them for nothing else you would love army people for their hospitality.  But in the higher sense of that beautiful word they are the least hospitable of people.  Their latch string of the spirit is not out.  Their minds are tight—­fixed.  They have not that openness of spirit and flexibility of mind that make for wider visioning.

“And it’s not that they haven’t, but why they haven’t, brings one to the vein.

“Yes, I got the article you sent me, written by your army friend, eloquent over the splendid things war has done for the human race, the great things it has bred in us.  Well if the ‘war virtues’ aren’t killed by an armed peace, then I don’t think we need worry much about ever losing them.  It’s the people at war for peace who are going to conserve and utilize for the future the strong and shining things which days of war have left us.  Men who must base their great claim on what has been done in the past are not the men to shape the future—­or even carry the heritage across the bridge.  War is now a faithful servant of capitalism.  Its glorious days are over.  It’s even a question whether it’s longer valuable as a servant.  It may lose its job before its master loses his.  In any case, it goes with capitalism; and if the good old war virtues are to be saved out of the wreck it’s the wreckers will save them!

“Which is not what I started out to say.  This play into which I’m seeking to get the heart of what I’ve lived and thought and dreamed is not the impersonal thing this harangue might make it sound.  I trust it’s nothing so bloodless as a study of economic forces or picture of the relationship of old things to new.  It’s that only as that touches a man’s life, means something to that life.  It’s about the army because this man happens, for a time, to be in the army—­it’s what the army does to him that’s the thing.

“Though it seems to me a pretty dead thing in these days.  Life itself is a dead thing with you gone from it.”

In the letter she received that night he wrote:  “Katie, is it going to spoil it for us?  Can it? Need it?  We who have come so close?  Have so much?  Are outlived things to push us apart?  That seems too bitter!