th
their boots on.

This was a great disappointment at first. I should never have known, from
anything that was said, that a man of them was stirred at the thought of
fighting for old England. England was all right, but "I ain't goin' balmy
about the old flag and all that stuff." Many of them insisted that they
were in the army for personal and selfish reasons alone. They went out of
their way to ridicule any and every indication of sentiment.

There was the matter of talk about mothers, for example. I can't imagine
this being the case in a volunteer army of American boys, but not once,
during fifteen months of British army life, did I hear a discussion of
mothers. When the weekly parcels from England arrived and the boys were
sharing their cake and chocolate and tobacco, one of them would say,
"Good old mum. She ain't a bad sort"; to be answered with reluctant,
mouth-filled grunts, or grudging nods of approval. As for fathers, I
often thought to myself, "What a tremendous army of posthumous sons!"
Months before I would have been astonished at this reticence. But I had
learned to understand Tommy. His silences were as eloquent as any
splendid outbursts or glowing tributes could have been. Indeed, they were
far more eloquent! Englishmen seem to have an instinctive understanding
of the futility, the emptiness, of words in the face of unspeakable
experiences. It was a matter of constant wonder to me that men, living in
the daily and hourly presence of death, could so surely control and
conceal their feelings. Their talk was of anything but home; and yet, I
knew they thought of but little else.

One of our boys was killed, and there was the letter to be written to his
parents. Three Tommies who knew him best were to attempt this. They made
innumerable beginnings. Each of them was afraid of blundering, of causing
unnecessary pain by an indelicate revelation of the facts. There was a
feminine fineness about their concern which was beautiful to see. The
final draft of the letter was a little masterpiece, not of English, but
of insight; such a letter as any one of us would have wished his own
parents to receive under like circumstances. Nothing was forgotten which
could have made the news in the slightest degree more endurable. Every
trifling personal belonging was carefully saved and packed in a little
box to follow the letter. All of this was done amid much boisterous
jesting. And there was the usual hilarious singing to th