rockets. Orders come in for artillery retaliation, and your guns begin
to stamp the ground like stallions; in the darkness on every side you
can see them snorting fire. Then stillness again, while Death counts his
harvest; the white rockets grow fainter and less hysterical. For an hour
there is blackness.

My batman consoles himself with singing,

"Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile."

There's a lot in his philosophy--it's best to go on smiling even when
some one who was once your pal lies forever silent in his blanket on a
stretcher.

The great uplifting thought is that we have proved ourselves men. In our
death we set a standard which in ordinary life we could never have
followed. Inevitably we should have sunk below our highest self. Here we
know that the world will remember us and that our loved ones, in spite
of tears, will be proud of us. What God will say to us we cannot
guess--but He can't be too hard on men who did their duty. I think we
all feel that trivial former failures are washed out by this final
sacrifice. When little M. used to recite "Breathes there a man with soul
so dead, who never to himself had said, 'This is my own, my native
land,'" I never thought that I should have the chance that has now been
given to me. I feel a great and solemn gratitude that I have been
thought worthy. Life has suddenly become effective and worthy by reason
of its carelessness of death.

By the way, that Princeton man I mentioned so long ago was killed forty