Their complaints were often ridiculous enough. They objected to the backwardness, the lack of sanitation, the absence of bathing facilities in the French villages. These were true enough, as far as they went, although I know personally that they can be matched in many details even in prosperous and enlightened America. They objected to the French climate, with the damp cold of its winters, not caring to remember that certain parts of our own Pacific coast suffer from a rainy season, too. This complaint becomes still more valueless when we remember how the boys grumbled about the heat of the Texas border, in fact, how soldiers not in action will always find a source of complaint in the weather, whatever kind of weather it may be. As General O'Ryan remarked in his famous definition of a soldier, "A soldier is a man who always wants to be somewhere else than where he is." This restlessness accounts for some of the complaints which we are apt to take a bit too seriously. A more real complaint was the language difficulty. Soldier French was a wonderful thing, consisting of the names of all ordinary things to eat and drink, together with a few common expressions, such as "toute de suite" (always pronounced "toot sweet"), and "combien." This prevented easy communication, even with such French people as were encountered. Few of the soldiers had any opportunity to use even their little French on respectable, middle-class French families, especially not on young men or girls. All these grievances, real and fancied, put the soldier out of ease in France and made him appreciate America so much the better. The sacrifices they were making for America, the service they were rendering her, united with the home-sickness of a stranger in a strange land to increase the devotion and respect of Americans for America. I need not refer especially to the rather mixed gain in religious attitude, as I have already devoted a chapter to that subject. I must, however, repeat one point I mentioned there, the meanings of physical sacrifice as these men saw it and practised it in the army. It was the outcome of their courage, their dash, their enthusiasm, that when the time of stress came ordinary men offered their lives for their friends and their country. The soldier at the front equaled or exceeded the forgetfulness of self of the fireman or the life-saver in time of peace. This lesson of self-forgetfulness, of self-sacrifice, was one of the great impressions made by the war upon the best men it influenced, and one which touched in its way even the most thoughtless and careless of all the soldiers who had their hour at the front.