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.

"I haven't had a letter in five months from home," a boy in a hospital
said to me. He was lonely and discouraged. And right here may I say
to the American people that there is no one thing that needs more
constant urging than the plea that you write, write, write to your
soldier in France. He would rather have letters than candy, or
cigarettes, or presents of any kind, as much as he loves some of these
material things. I have put it to a vote dozens of times, and the
result is always the same; ten to one they would rather have a letter
from home than a package of cigarettes or a box of candy. I have seen
boys literally suffering pangs that were a thousand times worse than
wounds because they did not receive letters from those at home.

"Hell! Nobody back there cares a damn about me! I haven't received a
letter in five months!" a boy burst out in my presence in Nancy one
night.

"Have you no mother or sister?"

"Yes, but they're careless; they always were about letter-writing."

I tried to fix up excuses for them, but it tested both my imagination
and my enthusiasm to do it. I could put no real heart into mak