Perhaps that is the root of the whole matter of morale. A good soldier at the rear was the man who sank his personality and became a unit in the squad. If too strongly defined an individual, he was a marked man; he became company clerk or kitchen police, according to his previous education. The good soldier was the one who acted automatically on receipt of orders, who saluted, said "Yes, sir," turned on his heel and seemed at once to be very busy. Even if he had been an executive or a lawyer in civil life, the constant drill made an automaton of the enlisted man; he sank back into the mind of the crowd, adopted the usual opinions in the usual words, and lost for the time being his personality. Drill made for automatic physical reactions to a certain set of commands and the temporary cessation of thought. In close-order drill Tom Smith submerged his personality and became "Number Three in the rear rank." He learned to swing about at the proper moment, following the man ahead of him, to respond instantly to the word of command without hesitating for its meaning, to stand and march and salute and obey. That was good for the rear, but at the front we needed Tom Smith again, and he might forget his place in the line, rush forward on his own initiative and become a hero. The finest acts were those of individuals acting without orders, the private forming a stretcher party of volunteers to go out for the wounded, the corporal reforming the platoon when all the sergeants were disabled and leading them forward. Then in the long period after the war Tom Smith had to be lost, for Number Three in the rear ranks was needed again. The soldier lived in utter ignorance, not only of general events in the world and the army, but even of the things which would affect himself most closely. The enlisted man never knew a day in advance when he would be transferred to a different post or a different duty, when he would be promoted or degraded in rank, when he was to attack the enemy or retire for a rest. Even the things he saw became distorted. A doughboy remarked to me just before the battle of the Selle River, "We're held up by a little stream twenty feet wide, with Jerry on top of the railroad embankment on the other side. If we can just get across that river and up that embankment, we'll end the war right there." Of course, our success three days later did not end the war; it was only part of a tremendous program which the private soldier did not envisage at all. The attack on the Selle River was but one of a half-dozen actions carried on simultaneously in Flanders, on the Scheld, at Rheims, in the Argonne and on the Meuse. Our attack was made easier because of these others, and they in turn were successful because of ours. The three hundred miles of battle-line were all one, and only the broadest possible view could give any idea at all of the truth.