It is a great honor to be an active French officer. He is there because his achievements forced him upward. He has climbed over obstacles, and been promoted on account of merit, not through influence. He holds the front, while the inefficient, the aged, or crippled, are relegated to the rear.
The soldier pays with his hide for the civilian’s comforts. The civilian, in turn, apes the soldier, presents a military bearing, in khaki coat, with swagger stick, a camera, a haversack and Joiners’ decorations. While the citizen works (or shirks) to sustain the soldier, he is either using his strength on the front, or building it up in the hospital.
An enthusiastic, spirited volunteer, gradually becomes a silent, sober, calculating veteran. His days have been troubled. His nights knew no peace. Recognizing discipline as the first principle of organization, that it is necessary to have individual obedience, for a group to act harmoniously, he submits. On the front, he finds—himself.
Half a dozen men are taking comfort in the shelter of a dugout. The next instant, five are one hundred feet in air, snuffed out, torn into atoms. But one is left, staring, mouth open. The others, swift arrivals at Kingdom Come, went so quickly into the great Beyond, they never knew or felt the shock.
So with the rum ration low and the water high, the morning bright in sunlight, surroundings dark with death, one’s thoughts spring from the mind. Words fill the mouth. One grasps his pencil to catch burning impressions that flood his brain. He might as well try to tell his grandmother how to raise babies as to think straight! He reaches out and connects up, apparently isolated, strings of thought. He links a chain of circumstance bearing on destruction’s delirious delusions that now rocks the foundations of the world, which reacts on and affects every civilization, person, and individual on earth.
He looks at things from an angle different from that of the civilian. He has a new conception of life. He is not the same person he was before the war. No longer does he smell the flowers, eat the fruit, or dwell in the home of civilization. He has lived, like a beast, in a hole in the ground, and slept in a seeping dugout with the rats and the lice. He has seen his companion go over the top, killed off, like germs, changed from a human comrade into a clod. He has lived long between two earthen walls, the blue sky above, a comrade on each side, with Fritz across the way.