you in your tracks, pilfers the cash box and makes a get away. Now suppose thousands of watchmen are in the same fix. That in principle is what has happened to our untrained men in all our wars. They haven’t had a chance. And because they haven’t had a chance, they have come home from the catastrophe with all sorts of ill-feeling against the army, the soldier, the officer, when the fault has been not in the military service, but in the neglect of proper training before the enemy pounces upon us. Just how much waste and hardship to individuals would result, if the country grocery store at Seven Corners had to expand to a thousand chain-stores in thirty days? Can you imagine it? And yet such an expansion is a drop in the bucket to what the Army and the War Department have been compelled to produce in a twinkling, when war caught us flat-footed. Of course, when we got into the World War we were pretty lucky, for we had Allies who held off the enemy for nearly a year before we had to go into real action. Just what would have happened had we not had such a wall of strength in Europe to stave off our enemies is not pretty to think about. As it was, many an American went to the front untrained, unskilled, an easy prey to disease and explosives. From this lack of preventive medicine, which is what training in peace time amounts to, many men have come out of our wars disgusted, and sayings have arisen which have put the army in a mean light. There’s the word “soldiering” which oddly has come to mean idleness. Yet if you were to go into any army post, any army school, or any C.M.T.C. camp you’d see the soldier anything but idle. Then there’s the term “passing the buck” which expresses an army habit to some people. Just why it should, after your experiences and mine in everyday life, is hard to explain. But the “old army game” is the one we hear so often. It may mean anything from four-flushing to downright crookedness. All these slanders seem to have arisen because men have been rudely and unjustly snatched from the counter, the plough and the mill to face a new desperate life, to live in mixed-up conditions under hasty shelter, to find themselves square pegs in round holes, and to be under officers as unskilled as they, officers not even a quarter baked, whose leadership was too often faulty and cruel. How could it be otherwise when we plunge fine young men who can’t swim into a raging sea? These men come out of the conflict with heavy hatreds, justifiable ones oftentimes, hatreds that go deep into their souls. And whom would they hate? Naturally the professional soldier. He’s the one at hand. But curiously enough it’s the trained soldier who has tried to prevent the awful haste, waste and unnecessary mortality that have caused these hatreds.