The only common ground of all soldiers was the army. The men knew work, discipline, war. They did not regard these things as an officer would, and a wise preacher found out their attitude in detail whenever he could. But this was concrete material, common to them all. They all hated to be under authority, but had nevertheless learned the lesson of discipline for practical purposes. They were fascinated by fighting, but feared it and preferred it, on the whole, to the tedium of peace. They found a greater monotony in army drill than in any other one thing in the world. They were brave when occasion arose. They had seen their friends drop dead at their side and had mourned and buried them. They had seen comrades promoted, now by favoritism, now by ability, and held a mixed feeling of ambition and of dislike for responsibility and the drudgery of thinking for themselves. They had problems of conduct, problems of morale, problems of vision, and they welcomed any discussion of their own problems in their own language, while despising infinitely the man who made a mistake in military terminology or showed lack of knowledge of the army. Their knowledge and their interest was narrow but keen, and one was compelled to meet the soldier on his own ground to interest or influence him. This concrete material of the soldier's daily life had to be presented to him in his own language--minus the profanity which was all too common and meaningless in the average soldier's vocabulary. Here again the soldier proved a unique audience. With all his quickness to grasp an idea, his lightning sense of humor, his immediate sense of reality and recognition of fact, he had in many cases the vocabulary of a ten-year-old child. Many of our soldiers were from the mine, the farm, the sweatshop. Many of them learned English from the daily papers; many from their semi-literate companions. A few hundred very simple English words and plenty of army slang were the chief reliance of the preacher, and other expressions had to be defined as one went along. One did not need to "talk down" to the soldier in ideas--he could leap past a course of argument to a sure conclusion in any field within his experience--but the language was necessarily the language of the soldier for either full comprehension or complete sympathy.