Sometimes I have thought that three things have stood as concrete symbols of all that was desirable to the American boy through his ordeal over here: a dollar-bill, the Statue of Liberty, his mother’s face. And only a shade less touching than the doughboy’s realization of all that is implied by “Mother;” is his attitude of chivalrous idealism toward the American girl. Once I ventured to say something in praise of the women of France.
“But they’re not as fine as our girls!” came the instant jealous rejoinder.
“No Mademoiselles françaises for me, thank you. I’ve got a little girl of my own back home!”
“Our American girls, they’re as different from these French girls,” declared a tall Virginian, “as day is from night!”
“I’ve laid off of lovin’ while I’ve been over here,” confided one little engineer, “but, oh boy! my girl’s goin’ to get an awful huggin’ when I get home!”
The most pitiful and hopeless cases that I have seen over here were boys who had taken to drink because their girls at home had proved inconstant. “That man never touched a drop,” confided the buddy of one of these to me, “until he got that letter from his girl telling him that she was married to a slacker.”
Not that the doughboy’s conduct has always been above reproach. “Single men in barracks,” as Kipling once remarked, “don’t grow into plaster saints;” and he has been sorely tempted. But in his heart he has kept an ideal. It has stood between him and utter darkness. In this ideal he has put all his faith. If he loses it, he loses everything. Those women back home, I wonder, do they really understand?