I have seen boys come out of battles made new men. I have seen them go
into the line sixteen-year-old lads, and come out of the trenches men.
I saw a lad who had gone through the fighting in Belleau Woods. I
talked with him in the hospital at Paris. His face was terribly
wounded. He was ugly to look at, but when I talked with him I found a
soul as white as a lily and as courageous as granite.

"I may look awful," he said, "but I'm a new man inside. What I saw out
there in the woods made me different, somehow. I saw a friend stand by
his machine-gun, with a whole platoon of Germans sweeping down on him,
and he never flinched. He fired that old gun until every bullet was
gone and his gun was red-hot. I was lying in the grass where I could
see it all. I saw them bayonet him. He fought to the last against
fifty men, but, thank God, he died a man; he died an American. I lay
there and cried to see them kill him, but every time I think of that
fellow it makes me want to be more of a man. When I get back home I'm
going to give up my life to some kind of Christian service. I'm going
to do it because I saw that man die so bravely. If he can die like
that, in spite of my face I can live like a man."

The boys in the trenches live a year in a month, a month in a week, a
week in a day, a day in an hour, and sometimes an eternity in a second.
No wonder it makes men of them overnight. No wonder they come out of
it all with that "high look" that John Oxenham writes about. They have
been reborn.

Another wounded boy who had gone through the fighting back of
Montdidier said to me in the hospital: