Many a young man who went to war learned the precious lesson that sympathy, though he might crave it, instead of doing him good would do harm. Many a manly character was rounded out into firm self-control and independence by military discipline and the lack of anything like sentimentality in camp and military life. A good many mothers whose boys had been the objects of their special solicitude felt very sorry to think that they would have to submit to the hardships and trials involved in military discipline. Most of them who were solicitous in this way were rather inclined to feel that their boy might not be able to stand up under the rigidities of military life and hoped at most that he would not be seriously harmed. They could not think that early rising, hard work, severe physical tasks, tiring almost to exhaustion, with plain, hearty, yet rather coarse food, eaten in slapdash fashion, would be quite the thing for their boy of whom they had taken so much care. Not a few of them were surprised to find how the life under these difficult circumstances proved practically always beneficial. I remember distinctly that when the soldiers were sent to the Mexican border the mother of {61} a soldier from a neighboring State remarked rather anxiously to me that she did not know what would happen to Jack under the severe discipline incident to military life. He had always gone away for five or six weeks in the summer either to the mountains or to the seashore, and the Mexican border, probably the most trying summer climate in the United States, represented the very opposite of this. Besides, there was the question of the army rations; Jack was an only son with five sisters. Most of them were older than he, and so Jack had been coddled as though by half a dozen mothers. He was underweight, he had a rather finicky appetite, he was capricious in his eating both as to quantity and quality, and was supposed to be a sufferer from some form of nervous indigestion. Personally, I felt that what Jack needed was weight, but I had found it very hard to increase his weight. He was particularly prone to eat a very small breakfast, and his mother once told me that whenever he was at home, she always prepared his breakfast for him with her own hands. This did not improve matters much, however, for Jack was likely to take a small portion of the meat cooked for him, refuse to touch the potatoes, and eat marmalade and toast with {62} his coffee and nothing more. No wonder that he was twenty pounds underweight or that his mother should be solicitous as to what might happen to her Jack in army life at the Border.