"If only they could understand it," he wrote to Jean. "You haven't any idea what rotten letters some of the women write. Blaming the men for going over seas. Blaming them for going into it at all. Taking it as a personal offense that their lovers have left them. 'If you had loved me, you couldn't have left me,' was the way one woman put it, and I found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter. 'It isn't a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what we've got to do, if we call ourselves men,' he said. But she couldn't see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule. "But, thank God, most of the women are the real thing--true as steel and brave. And it is those women that the men worship. It is a masculine trait to want to be a sort of hero in the eyes of the woman you love. When she doesn't look at it that way, your plumes droop!" And now the bugles rang with a clearer note--not, "You will go, you will go--" but, "Do not wait, do not wait, do not wait." The cry from abroad was Macedonian. "Come over and help us!" It was to America that the ghosts of those fighting hordes appealed. "Take up our quarrel with the foe, To you from falling hands we throw The torch--be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders' field--" Gradually there had grown up in the hearts of simple men a flaming response to that sacred charge. Men whose dreams had never reached beyond a day's frivolity, found springing up in their souls a desire to do some deed to match that of the other fellow who slept "in Flanders field." "To you from falling hands we throw the torch--be yours to hold it high--," the little man who had measured cloth behind a counter, the boy who had sold papers on the streets, the bank clerk who had bent over his books, the stenographer who had been bound to the wheel of everlasting dictation, were lighted by the radiance of that vision, "to hold it high--." "Gee, I never used to think," said Tommy Tracy, "that I might have a chance to do a stunt like that." "Like what?" Derry asked. Tommy found it a thing rather hard to express. "Well, when you've been just a common sort of chap, to die--for the other fellow--" So men's bodies grew and their muscles hardened. But their souls grew, too, expanding to the breadth and height of the things which were waiting for them to do across the sea. And one morning Derry was granted a furlough, and started home. He sent no word ahead of him. He wanted to come upon them unawares. To catch the light that would be on Jean's face when she looked up and saw him.