Our soldiers are more than three thousand miles away from home, and they have gone on a terrible errand. We know less about war than any other women in the world, but we know that it is a brutal, pitiless, bloodthirsty business. We know that bodies perish in war, and sometimes souls, which is worse. Going over in the steamer a horrible story was told me, a story which turned out to be quite untrue, but which when I heard it cost me a sleepless night. It was to the effect that vice was so rampant in all the armies that a whole shipload of hopelessly diseased Australian soldiers had recently sailed from England. The hospitals had salvaged many, it was said, but these men, who had left home clean, wholesome, decent boys, were now being sent back to die, physical and moral wrecks. Some, it was certain, would commit suicide during the voyage. That tale filled me with such terror that I went to some lengths to investigate it. It was quite untrue, and I repeat it here only because it is representative of stories that are current everywhere and add greatly to the sufferings of the women at home. _The first thing I want to say about our army is that the men are morally as safe in France as they could possibly be at home. I made it my particular business to know it._ I spent three months in France, traveling over most of the considerable territory occupied by the American forces. I visited something like twenty-five camps, small ones, large ones and immense ones, where the men are training, where they are being made into experts in special lines of fighting; where they are at work building miles of wharves, warehouses, cold storage plants, barracks and hospitals; where they are laying railroads and dredging rivers; where they are performing marvels of constructive work necessary to the life of an army far removed from its base. I met and talked with thousands of soldiers in their camps, in the Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross canteens, in many ancient towns of central France. I saw our men disembarking from their transports, and I saw them tramping through ice-cold mud to the front-line trenches. I talked with them in their billets in lonely little villages of the north, and in vacation cities of the azure south. I have visited American soldiers in hospitals and I have knelt beside their graves. _Our soldiers have only one enemy, and that is the Germans._ That enemy they must fight and conquer, and we over here must steel our hearts to the sacrifices of life, the suffering and maiming that are absolutely inevitable and will have to be borne. The casualty lists, every day growing a little longer, are bound to grow even longer. What English mothers and French mothers, what all the people of all the warring nations have endured, we shall have to endure. It is the world’s pain and we can not escape it.