“When I first came here I had a sort of detached feeling.  I had no experiences to match with the experiences of other men.  I had never had to rush in the morning to catch a subway, I had never eaten, to put it poetically, by candlelight, so that I might get to the store by eight.  I had never sold papers, or plowed fields, or stood behind a counter.  I had never sat at a desk, I had never in fact done anything really useful, I had just been rich, and that isn’t much of a background as I am beginning to see it here—.

“I find myself having a rather strange feeling of exaltation as the days go by, because for the first time I am a cog in a great machine, for the first time I am toiling and sweating as I rather think it was intended that men should toil and sweat.  And the friends that I am making are the sign and seal of the levelling effects of this great war.  Not one of the men of what you might call my own class interests me half as much as Tommy Tracy, who before he entered the service drove the car of one of Dad’s business associates.  I have often ridden behind Tommy, but he doesn’t know it.  And I don’t intend that he shall.  He rather fancies that I am a scholarly chap torn from my books, and he patronizes me on the strength of his knowledge of practical things.

“Tommy likes to eat, and he talks a great deal about his mother’s cooking.  He says there was always tripe for Sunday mornings, and corned beef and cabbage on Mondays, and Monday was wash-day!

“I wish you could hear him tell what wash-day meant to him.  It is a sort of poem, the way he puts it.  He doesn’t know that it is poetry, though Vachell Lindsay would, or Masters, or some of those fellows.

“It seems that he used to help his mother, because he was a strong little fellow, and could turn the wringer, and they would get up very early because he had to go to school, and in the spring and summer they washed out of doors, under a tree in the yard, and his mother’s eyes were bright and her cheeks were red and her arms were white, and she was always laughing.  There’s a memory for a man on the battlefield, dearest, a healthy, hearty memory of the day’s work of a boy, and of a bright-eyed mother, and of a good dinner at the end of hours of toil.

“Perhaps with such a mother it isn’t surprising that Tommy has made so much of himself.  He has aspirations far beyond driving some other man’s car, and if he keeps on he’ll have a little flivver of his own before he knows it—­when the war ends, and he can strike out, with his energy at the boiling point.

“There are a lot of men who have belonged not to the idle rich, but to the idle poor, and the discipline of this life is just the thing for them as it is for me.  It rather contradicts the kindergarten idea of play as a preparation for life.  These busy men, forced to be busy, are a thousand times more self-respecting than if left to lead the listless lives that were theirs before their country called them.  I wonder if, after all, Kipling isn’t right, and that the hump and hoof and haunch of it all isn’t obedience?  Not slavish obedience, but obedience founded on a knowledge of one’s place and value in the pack?”