“There are countless streaks of humor and gleams of laughter even amid the sorrow-clouds of war. The mysterious diseases from which the soldier thinks he suffers sometimes puzzle you. He will proudly, and with a majestic solemnity, tell you that his illness has developed into ‘gasteria’—perhaps a more accurately descriptive name than science recognizes. More than one is sorry for his wife, who is distracted and harrowed by the ‘insinuendoes’ of her neighbors, a word almost worthy of a place in the dictionary. And many will tell you of chums who have broken down, and who were not really fit to serve, having been always of a ‘historical’ tendency. One almost feels a plea for heredity there. “How grateful we were when we found occasions like these! For, though we were not downhearted, we were often war-weary. And frequently the good cheer of those whom we were there to comfort and strengthen really strengthened and comforted us. MICKY FREE REVIVED “I remember an Irishman, quite of the type of Micky Free in Lever’s novel, a rollicking, jolly child of the Emerald Isle, pretty badly battered, but with a sparkle in his eye at which you could have lit a candle. He was from Dublin. I thought I should speak cheerfully to him, so I said, ‘Well, now, aren’t you lucky to be here, instead of home yonder, getting your head broken in a riot?’ ‘Troth, I am, sir,’ said he. ‘Lucky to be here, anyway. And lucky is anny man if he’ll only get a grave to lie in, let alone a comfortable bed like this. Glory be! it’s myself that’s been the lucky one all the time.’ Near him lay another. ‘Don’t spake to him, your honor,’ said the first man with a laugh. ‘Sure, he’s a Sinn Feiner.’ But both of them were of opinion that the loyalty of the rebels might be awakened by contact with German shells. ‘Bring them out here, sir,’ said they, ‘and they won’t be Irishmen if they don’t get their dander riz with a whiz-bang flung at them. That would settle their German philandering. Sure, isn’t it too bad what we’ve been enduring to enable the spalpeens to stay at home, upsetting the State, flinging Home Rule back maybe a generation, with their foolishness, and we as good Irishmen as themselves can be?’ [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._ Private Albert Fritz _1st Division, 16th Infantry, Company “I”_ Cited for extraordinary heroism in action south of Soissons, France, July 18-23, 1918. While attached to a machine-gun company as an ammunition carrier, he was wounded twice, but continued to carry ammunition while exposed to heavy shell fire.]