HELPING HIS WIFE OUT
An officer was surprised one day when searching the letters of his detachment to read in one of them a passage that was something like this:
“We have just got out of shell-fire for the first time for two months. It has been a hard time. The Germans were determined to take our field bakery, but, by gee! we would not let them. We killed them in thousands.”
This was a letter from one of the bakers to his wife. None of the detachment had been a mile from the base, and they had never seen a German, except as a prisoner. My friend knew the writer well, and could not help (although it was none of his business) asking him why he told such terrible lies to his poor wife. The soldier said:
“It’s quite true what you say, but it’s like this, sir. When my wife and the wives of the other men in the place where I live are talking it all over in the morning I couldn’t think to let her have nothing to say and the others all bragging about what their men had done with the Germans. That’s the way of it, sir.”