Is there any ritual (we cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue
the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and
seasoned qualities of manhood? It is well known that the fiercest
and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been
commuters. It was a Division composed chiefly of commuters that
stormed the Hindenburg Stellung and purged the Argonne thickets with
flame and steel. Their commanding officers were wont to remark these
men's carelessness of life. It seemed as though they hardly heeded
whether they got home again or not.
See them as they stand mobbed at the train gate, waiting for
admission to the homeward cars. A certain disingenuous casualness
appears on those hardened brows; but beneath burn stubborn fires.
These are engaged in battle, and they know it--a battle that never
ends. And while a warfare that goes on without truce necessarily
develops its own jokes, informalities, callousnesses, disregard of
wounds and gruesome sights, yet deep in their souls the units never
forget that they are drilled and regimented for struggle. We stood
the other evening with a Freeport man in the baggage compartment at
the front of a train leaving Brooklyn. We two had gained the
bull's-eye window at the nose of the train and sombrely watched the
sparkling panorama of lights along the track. Something had gone
wrong with the schedule that evening, and the passengers of the 5:27
had been shunted to the 5:30.
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