It is of course beside the truth to say that all young soldiers were big and cheerful and spirited and brave; but the total impression was certainly one of bigness, of freedom, and of exultation in the enterprise. One came to have a fierce pride in them, an impatience of any criticism of what they did, a longing to fight for them, since one could not fight beside them.
Crossing the Apache Trail in March of 1918, we picked up three silent, rough youths who had come from somewhere out of the desert, and were making for camp to enlist. They were fascinating traveling companions, shy, watchful, suspicious, discovering for the first time the ordinary arrangements of railroad life. I remember a wonderful young savage with whom I traveled for a day. We were depending on eating houses for food and woke up to find our train six hours late. This meant no breakfast until possibly eleven o’clock. Of course the boy was famished. He ate ravenously and then bought right and left sandwiches, pie, hard-boiled eggs, an armful of packages. You could almost hear him saying to himself, “They are not going to catch me again.” They had put one over on him, but next time he would be ready for them.
The interest of the boys in what was before them was unflagging. They were not afraid to talk about the worst. When the Tuscania went down, those bound for sailing points were not fazed in the least by the danger of the passage; but more than once I felt that the tragedy had whetted their desire to get at the enemy.
The interest of older men in the young soldier was inexhaustible. They were like the little boys in that. Little boys could not resist a soldier. It was startling to see a baby of three years slip away from his mother, walk down the aisle to where a soldier boy was sitting, watch him silently with wide-open eyes, get a little bolder, stretch out his hand and stroke his clothes, get a little bolder still and ask him if he might put on his cap.
Soldier or not soldier, however, the men talked war, talked it all the time when they were not reading their newspapers. How the news filtered to them in certain remote spots, it was hard to understand. In crossing the Apache Trail I was startled to see a man rise from the desert, as it seemed, and ask if we had any more news about “them big guns,” if anybody had found out “how they do it.” We gave him all the papers we had, and the passengers freely aired their theories of the mystery.
With the inexhaustible interest went a fierce determination to see that every suggestion of the Government was carried out. When the Third Liberty Loan opened I was traveling in a section where there were many German settlers.
“What is their attitude?” I asked a woman active in the work of our committee.
“We have but one family in this town,” she said. “After being waited on by five of our leading citizens they took $10,000 of Liberty Bonds.”
I do not know whether these citizens carried ropes in their hands when they made the call, but I did see in one town a detachment of citizens parading with ropes on the pummels of their saddles and banners marked “Beware.”
It had been agreed by all concerned that I talk on what was doing in Washington as I had been seeing it. Now and then I was “lent” by my sponsor to aid in a drive of one kind or another. Once I spoke from the platform of “Oklahoma Billy Sunday,” a picturesque and highly successful revivalist who patterned his campaigns after those of his great namesake. A liberty loan drive was on, and no gathering, not even a revival, certainly not a lecture, was allowed in the town which did not share its time with the grim banker heading the local committee. He opened the meeting and left me shivering with what might happen to those who differed with him about the size of their purchase. Then came boisterous singing and praying, broken to let me tell my story. How dull and uninspired it sounded, sandwiched between this goading and inflaming!