The soldier had a mixed feeling toward battle. The shock of conflict is exciting and exerts a sort of fascination. But the excitement was short while the danger was omnipresent and the work could never be escaped. The soldier regarded war as a sort of deadly game, where the contest called forth every energy and the stakes were life itself. But battle contains another factor--a compound of work and discomfort. War is nine parts sordid labor to one of glorious action. It was mixed with cooties, mud, sleeping in the rain, marching all night and lying down under artillery fire. It included digging, and the soldier found no more romance in digging in at the front than in digging a ditch at home, except that under fire he dug considerably faster. War involved carrying a pack, and that became speedily the pet hatred of the enlisted man. As the prisoner dreads the cell in which he is confined, so the infantryman feels toward his pack clinging with its eighty-odd pounds as he trudges along the weary roads. War is a glorious memory now, but it was neither glorious nor pleasant to live through. When the troops retired for rest and training, the problem of morale became reversed at once. Now it became a matter of discipline and drill. Instead of danger and discomfort, our trials were work and monotony. A high type of morale in the rear meant that the men were not absent without leave, that they worked hard at their drill and became automatic in its motions, that they obeyed every rule of discipline, large and small. Saluting, for example, was very important at the rear; we never once thought of it at the front. This regime was not always easy, though at first we could hold out the object of winning the war, as in the pamphlet on sex education, "Fit to Fight." After the war was over that object no longer remained. But the hard work remained, the kitchen police, the cleaning up of quarters, the carrying of the pack, the incessant drill. "Squads east and west," when the fighting was at an end and there was no direct use for maneuvers, seemed to the soldiers simply made work. In fact, much of the work imposed on them during this period was actually devised with the special object of keeping them busy and therefore out of mischief.