"The reason why?" we venture.
"The mothers of America," is the quick reply.
I know what she means. I have read letter after letter written by the doughboys to the mothers back here, and the mass of them still stay in my mind as a tribute that all but surpasses description. Some of them misspelled; many of them ungrammatical—where have our schools been these last few years?—a few of them humorous, a few pathetic, but all of them breathing a sentiment and a tenderness that makes me willing to call ours the sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of their army.
"We're not doing much," one after another has said, "but say, you ought to see my mother on the job back home. She's the one that's turning the trick."
It was a large experiment sending women with our army overseas—in the minds of many a most dubious experiment. In no other war had an army ever had women enrolled with it, save possibly a few nurses. It is an experiment which, so far as the United States is concerned, has more than justified itself. Our women have been tried in France—in other European lands as well—and have not been found wanting; which is a very faint way, indeed, of trying to tell of a great accomplishment. For if the American soldier, through many months of test and trial—and test and trial that by no means were confined to the battlefield—has kept his body clean and his soul pure through the virtue of woman which has been spread about him through the guarded years of his home life, how about the virtue of the women that, clad in the uniform of our Red Cross and the other war-relief organizations, guarded him successfully when he was far away from home? There is but one answer to such a question, but one question to follow after that. Here it is: Is it fair to longer consider such a real accomplishment a mere experiment? I think not. I think that it is rather to be regarded as a real triumph of our Americanism.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Transcriber's Note
Click on illustrations to see enlarged images.