never been away from home in their lives before; most of them boys who
have never crossed the ocean before, they will judge fairly and
understand better the loneliness of the American soldier. It is not a
loneliness that will make him any the less a soldier. Ay, it is
because of that very home love, and that very eagerness to get back to
his home, that he will and does fight like a veteran to get it over.

"Gosh! I wish I would find just one guy from Redding!" a
seventeen-year-old boy said to me one night as I stood in a Y. M. C. A.
hut. He was about the loneliest boy I saw in France. I saw that he
needed to smile. He was nothing but a kid, after all.

"Gosh! I wish I'd see just one guy from San Jose!" I said with a
smile. Then we both laughed and sat down to some chocolate, and had a
good talk, the very thing that the lad was hungry for.

He had been in France for nearly a year and he hadn't seen a single
person he knew. He had been sick a good deal of the time and had just
come from an appendix operation. He was depressed in spirits, and his
homesickness had poured itself out in that one phrase: "Gosh! I wish
I'd see just one guy from Redding!"

Those who do not think that homesickness comes under the heading of
"Suffering" had better look into the face of a truly homesick American
boy in France before he judges.

The English Tommy is only a few hours from home, and knows it. The
French soldier is fighting on his own native soil, but the American is
fighting three thousand miles away from home, and some of them seven
thousand.