n, we didn't come
over here to get killed particularly, we came over here to give these
Dutchmen h--l!

Perhaps you can excuse language if I write it with a blank like that,
but before we get back we're going to do what we came for. They may not
all of them be as bad as some of them--it's a good thing you don't know
what we do, because some of it would make you sick. As I say, there may
be quite a lot of good ones among them; but we know what they've done to
this country, and we know what they mean to do to ours. So we're going
to attend to them. Of course that's why I'm here. It wasn't you.

Don't forget to write pretty soon, Dora. You say in your letter--I
certainly was glad to get that letter--well, you say I have things to do
more important than "girls." Dora, I think you probably know without my
saying so that of course while I have got important things to do, just
as every man over here has, and everybody at home, for that matter,
well, the thing that is most important in the world to me, next to
helping win this war, it's reading the next letter from you.

Don't forget how glad I'll be to get it, and don't forget you didn't
have anything to do with my being over here. That was--it was something
else. And you bet, whatever happens I'm glad I came! Don't ever forget
_that_!

Dora knew it was "something else." Her memory went back to her first
recollection of him in school: from that time on he had been just an
ordinary, everyday boy, floundering somehow through his lessons in
school and through his sweethearting with Milla, as the millions of
other boys floundered along with their own lessons and their own
Millas. She saw him swinging his books and romping homeward from the
schoolhouse, or going whistling by her father's front yard, rattling
a stick on the fence as he went, care-free and masterful, but shy as a
deer if strangers looked at him, and always "not much of a talker."

She had always felt so superior to him, she shuddered as she thought of
it. His quiet had been so much better than her talk. His intelligence
was proven now, when it came to the great test, to be of a stronger sort
than hers. He was wise and good and gentle--and a fighting man! "We know
what they've done to this country and what they mean to do to ours. So
we're going to attend to them." She read this over, and she knew that
Ramsey, wise and gentle and good, would fight like an unchained devil,
and that he and his comrades would indeed