I shall never forget my friend the wrestler when I asked how it was that he kept so clean, and he replied:  “The letters help a lot.”

I have seen boys suffering from wounds of every description.  I have seen them lying in hospitals with broken backs.  I have seen them with blinded eyes.  I have seen them with legs gone, and arms.  I have seen them when the doctors were dressing their wounds.  I remember one captain who had fifty wounds in his back, and he had them dressed without a single cry.  I have seen them gassed, and I have seen them shot to pieces with shell shock, and yet the worst suffering I have seen in France has been on the part of boys whose folks back home have neglected them; boys who, day after day, had seen the other fellows get their letters regularly, boys who had gone with hope in their hearts time after time for letters, and then had lost hope.  This is real suffering, suffering that does more to knock the morale out of a lad than anything that I know in France.

Silhouettes of Suffering stand out in my memory with great vividness.  One general cause of suffering in addition to the above is loneliness in the heart of the young husband and father, who has a wife and kiddie back home.

I remember one young officer that I saw in a Paris hotel.  He had been out in the Vosges Mountains with a company of wood-choppers for six months.  He had come in for his first leave.  His leave lasted eight days.  Instead of going to the theatres he sat around in our officers’ hotel lobby and watched the women walking about, the Y. M. C. A. girls who were the hostesses there.  They noticed him as he sat there all evening, hardly moving.  After several nights one of the men secretaries went up to him and said:  “Why don’t you go over and talk with them?  They would be glad to talk with you.”

“Oh,” he said, “I never was much for women at home, except my wife and kid.  I never did know how to talk to women.  Especially now, for I’ve been up in the woods for six months.  Just let me sit here and look at ’em.  That’s enough for me.  Just let me sit here and look at ’em!”

And that was the way he spent his leave, just loafing around in that hotel lobby watching the women at their work.

“This has been the loneliest day of my life,” a major said to me on Mother Day in a great port of entry.

“Why, major?”

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the picture of a seven-year-old boy and that boy’s mother.

Suffering?  Yes, of course I have seen boys wounded, as I have said, but for real downright suffering, loneliness is worst, and it lies entirely within the province of the folks at home to alleviate this suffering.  I have seen a boy morose and surly, discouraged and grouchy in the morning.  He didn’t know what was the matter with himself.  In the afternoon I have seen him laughing and yelling like a wild animal at play, happy as a lark.