But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship. That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that comradeship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves, to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It brings back his cafe evenings, when black horror is reaching out for him. If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home. Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing, and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War. "I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling, after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in his sacrifice. Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The dreariness of it made B---- petulant and T---- mournfully silent, and finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.