Carlin stopped for a moment, frowning till his eyes showed only a blue glint.
"Lots of us that went were remembered," he said slowly, "and some—were forgotten."
He picked up a pencil and began scoring deep lines on a sheet of paper.
"Four years is a good slice out of a man's life. He loses a lot—in his life, his work—other men get the start of him—he's far away, and perhaps will never come back, and they're here.... When a man gives that much, and risks everything, in what seems a holy cause to him, it seems as if—it seems as if—"
His voice trembled. The Judge was watching him now intently. He got up and began to walk the floor again.
"You see, Judge, that's natural—to want to have some recognition of what you've done. And I know a lot of our fellows felt that the people at home didn't recognize it. They made a lot of fuss about us when we went away, but when we came back—those of us that did come back—they didn't get excited much about us.
"They were busy—they'd been living their lives in peace while we were fighting and protecting them—we stood between them and the enemy and most of them never felt what war is. They might know about it, but they didn't feel it, we saved them from that.... Then when we came back, sometimes they were glad to see us, sometimes not. Anyhow, we had to scramble around and see what we could do, to make a living, to get back the place we'd lost. Lots of us found it hard. It wasn't only the time lost, but those four years of war made a difference in us, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse...."
"Surely," said Judge Baxter, nodding.
"You see, Judge, it upsets all a man's habits and way of living. You can't make a good soldier of a man without loosening up some things in him that are usually kept down. He faces violent death every day, and he kills. It's a primitive thing, war is, and men get back to where they were. They suffer and they try to make the other fellow suffer more, they get callous, savage, lots of them. Then when they come back to civilized life, it's hard for them to fit in. I wonder there wasn't more trouble than there was, I wonder that that great army, nearly a million men, melted away as quietly as it did.... Judge, it was a great thing that we did—"
Carlin stopped and fixed his eyes on the Judge, who nodded gravely.