persistence.

"When all's said and done, miss, it's been a grand life--Brave lads for
comrades--a lass who kept faith to the end--a good fight an' somethin'
good to fight for--Near five years of it--wi' perdition grinnin' ye in the
face an' the Holy Mother walkin' at your back--Sure, I might ha' lived
fifty year in Letterkenny an' never tasted life half so
plentiful--or--so--sweet."

That was the strange part of it; they had all found life "plentiful an'
sweet"--nurses, surgeons, soldiers alike. They might be homesick, worn out
with the business of fighting and patching up afterward, eternally aching
in body and heart with the long stretches of horror and work with little
sleep and less food, and yet not a handful out of every thousand of them
would have chosen to quit if they could.

But when the quitting-time came, when war was over, what was going to
happen then? Sheila wondered it about the boys who lay unconscious on
their stretchers, packed in the room about her. She wondered it about the
boys conscious in their cots below. Most of all she wondered it about Ward
7-A. It was going to hurt so many to have to look beyond the immediate
day into a procession of numberless days stretching into years and years.
The sudden relaxing from big efforts to little ones, that would hurt, too,
like the uncramping of over-strained muscles. And the being thrown back on
oneself to think, to act, to feel for oneself again--what of that? It was
like dismembering a gigantic machine and scattering the infinitesimal
parts of it broadcast over the earth to function alone. Only many of the
parts would be imperfect, and all would have souls to reckon with.

But of the puzzle of it one fact stood out grippingly vital to Sheila. No
soul must be thrown out of the melting-pot back into the old accustomed
order of life and be left to feel unfit or unnecessary. There must be a
big, compelling place for every man who came home. Of all the tragedies of
war, she could conceive no greater one than to have these men who had put
no limit to the price they were willing to pay to make the world safe for
democracy sent back useless, to mark time to eternity.

But who was going to keep this from happening? How were the thousands of
mutiles to be made free of the burden of dependence and toleration? Who
was going to guard them against atrophy of spirit? The nurse gathered up
the last of the instruments and threw them in the sterilizer. As she took
off