“Our American girls, they’re as different from these French girls,” declared a tall Virginian, “as day is from night!” “I’ve laid off of lovin’ while I’ve been over here,” confided one little engineer, “but, oh boy! my girl’s goin’ to get an awful huggin’ when I get home!” The most pitiful and hopeless cases that I have seen over here were boys who had taken to drink because their girls at home had proved inconstant. “That man never touched a drop,” confided the buddy of one of these to me, “until he got that letter from his girl telling him that she was married to a slacker.” Not that the doughboy’s conduct has always been above reproach. “Single men in barracks,” as Kipling once remarked, “don’t grow into plaster saints;” and he has been sorely tempted. But in his heart he has kept an ideal. It has stood between him and utter darkness. In this ideal he has put all his faith. If he loses it, he loses everything. Those women back home, I wonder, do they really understand? End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl, by Katharine Duncan Morse