He said his outfit contained men of all types and kinds. Men from colleges who could discuss literature and the fine arts as well as the arts of war. Men who looked upon the adventure at hand with an optimistic philosophy that reassured all who knew them. Men from the slums who swore and cursed disgustingly but would give the shirts from their backs if you happened to need them more than they. Men who told dirty stories and sang rotten songs about unmentionable obscenities one minute, and the next conversed in language that would do justice to a Ladies’ Aid meeting. Men who read books and wrote many letters, who showed you pictures of their best girls at home and told you stories about their families and their friends and their former occupations. Men who could work in muck and mud all day, and were able at night to talk intelligently and sincerely of the finer things of life. He even had some buddies who liked poetry as much as he did, but they had adapted themselves to the rimeless rhythm of the life about them. He had found that the noncoms were not all bullies to their subordinates and kotowing toadies to their superiors. Some were like this, but more often they were hard-working, serious-minded fellows, eager to carry on, get the ugly business finished as soon as possible, and return home. To men and officers alike this war was the great adventure. Its discomforts and sufferings and dangers were just things to be taken as part of the day’s work. A man put up with anything to be able to say some day, “I was there.” He had found, as I had found, that all this business of being at war was not a mess of corruption, beastliness and brutality. There were other features to this life than those that are so cried about and proclaimed. It was a glorious adventure! I don’t mean to pollyanna the grimy business, this drab and dreary affair in which men walked blindly into almost certain death or injury—what I mean is that there unquestionably was a fine, an ideal, a truly noble side to the thing. Like beautiful flowers growing out of a bed of filth and rot. Like the lovely poppies that they say grew on the graves filled with the rotting bodies of men in the battlefields.... That isn’t exactly what I mean, but the idea is there, and I was glad to learn that Leon had come to feel toward it all much as I was feeling. It seemed to me that through coming to an understanding of and sympathy for other men, Leon had himself become a man. I doubted if Vyvy could realize the change, even if he wrote to her, but she had nevertheless been the real maker of this man whose name she didn’t know. I told Leon he could write his own love letters now, but he said “The man who censors my mail would wonder what the idea was if I signed my real name, and Vyvy would be wondering if I signed my alias.... You’d better keep on as you are.”