Then he adjusts his glasses
and begins to read.)
"Dear dad,
"The sky is the colour of smeared charcoal. We haven't been in the
trenches long enough to evolve web feet, so mine are resting on a duck
board spread over a quagmire of pea soup. The Heinies are right here,
soaking in another ditch beyond a barbed wire fence, about the distance
of second base from the home plate. Such is modern war!
"But these aren't the things that trouble me. Last night, when I was wet
to the skin and listening to the shells--each singing its own song in the
darkness--I was able to think with astonishing ease better than if I were
sitting at a mahogany desk in a sound proof room! I was thinking over
the talk we had the day I left home,--do you remember it?--about the real
issue of this war. I've thought of it time and again, but I've never
written you about it. Since I have been in France I have had a liberal
education gathered from all sorts and conditions of men. Right here in
the trench near me are a street car conductor, a haberdasher, a Swedish
farm hand, a grocery clerk, a college professor, a Pole from the Chicago
Stock Yards, an Irish American janitor of a New York apartment house, and
Grierson from Cleveland, whose father has an income of something like a
million a year.
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