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