“When we first met over here,” wrote Kilmer’s friend Charles L. O’Donnell, Chaplain 332d Infantry, in a letter to Thomas Walsh which should be written into the record, “he was in the personnel department of his regiment, having had his time of service in the field and done some particularly good work in the intelligence line. He was then about to go into the intelligence permanently and so avid of it was he as to be ready to relinquish his hard-earned sergeant’s chevrons. In the event, however, that sacrifice was not demanded. After this change in his work he was much more agreeably placed, in particular he had more freedom and more time to see his friends. He was worshipped by the men about him. I have heard them speak with awe of his coolness and his nerve in scouting patrols in No Man’s Land. As an intelligence man he made personally a few very valuable discoveries: this was when I was with him in our comparatively quiet sector. I can only conceive that he distinguished himself later in the larger opportunities that came his way.” The letter continues: We were both in the army but he was also of it. I was amazed to find him so quickly become a soldier with the soldier’s point of view. But he had seen so much more than I, even then, and each day in this war is equivalent to long campaigns of other times. I felt, and was a rookie beside him. He had got a perspective on his life at home that made him smile with indulgent pity on some literary aspects of it. I spoke of what must have been his earlier views, the good he was doing and the need of doing it. But he was not ready to relinquish a position he had bought at the price of suffering, cold, hunger, fatigue, with the hourly self denials that military discipline means. Not that he spoke of these things in this way, but I knew they had gone into the creation of his new stand and I knew in my heart it was higher ground. A closer witness is Sergeant-Major Lemist Esler, who served side by side with Kilmer in the Marne advance. Shortly afterward returned to the United States for service as an instructor at an army cantonment, he said in an interview in the _New York Times_: “The front was his goal and no sooner had the regiment reached France than he made every possible effort to be transferred.” He finally had himself moved to the Intelligence Department. It was in that department that he was elevated to the rank of Sergeant. I was supply sergeant at the time and Joyce Kilmer was a perfect trial to me. He would always be doing more than his orders called for--that is, getting much nearer to the enemy’s positions than any officer would ever be inclined to send him. Night after night he would lie out in No Man’s Land, crawling through barbed wires, in an effort to locate enemy positions, and enemy guns, and tearing his clothes to shreds. On the following day he would come to me for a new uniform.