Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer

TOM TURNED ON HIS SEARCHLIGHT AND SAW A GERMAN SOLDIER, HATLESS AND COATLESS. Frontispiece ( Page 8 )
Copyright, 1918, by GROSSET & DUNLAP

It was good advice that Rudyard Kipling gave his young British soldier in regard to the latter's rifle:
Tommy Atkins' rifle was by no means the first inanimate or dumb thing to prove human and to deserve human treatment. Animals of all sorts have been given this quality. Jack London's dog, in The Call of the Wild , has human interest. So has the immortal Black Beauty .
But we are not concerned with animals now. Kipling's ocean liner has human interest—a soul. I need not tell you that a boat is human. Its every erratic quality of crankiness, its veritable heroism under stress, its temperament (if you like that word) makes it very human indeed. That is why a man will often let his boat rot rather than sell it.
This is not true of all inanimate things. It depends. I have never heard of a steam roller or a poison gas bomb being beloved by anybody. I should not care to associate with a hand grenade. It is a matter of taste; I dare say I could learn to love a British tank, but I could never make a friend and confidante of a balloon. An aeroplane might prove a good pal—we shall have to see.
Davy Crockett actually made a friend and confidante of his famous gun, Betsy . And Betsy is known in history. It is said that the gun crews on armed liners have found this human quality in their guns, and many of these have been given names— Billy Sunday , Teddy Roosevelt , etc.
I need not tell you that a camp-fire is human and that trees are human.
The pioneers of old, pressing into the dim wilderness, christened their old flintlocks and talked to them as a man may talk to a man. The woodsman's axe was deare and greatly beloved, we are told.
The hard-pressed Indian warrior knelt in the forest and besought that life-long comrade, his bow, not to desert or fail him. King Philip kept in his quiver a favorite arrow which he never used because it had earned retirement by saving his own life.