Recently experiments have been carried on in some factories with phonographs, and it has been proven that if the fingers of the employes are stimulated by some music they enjoy, it is possible to get more work out of them. In some Cuban cigar factories it is the customary thing to employ a man to read to the cigar makers some story which they like, as, under these conditions, they work better and faster.
All this is not done out of sentiment, again, but because it contributes to efficiency. The cow, the hen, the factory girl and the cigar wrapper do better work for being in a pleasant frame of mind.
While we of the American Expeditionary Forces do not fall into any of these classes, the same is nevertheless probably true of us. We can be better soldiers if we are cheerful than we can if we are not. It may be difficult to see how you can sight a gun any better for smiling or bayonet a man more effectively when you are cheerful. But if we believe what we are told, this is so, and, hence, since we all want to be good soldiers, it becomes a duty toward this end to be happy, just as it is a duty to wash your face or police your bunk, or to keep your rifle clean. It is a duty to be happy.
That is all very well and good to say, some one interrupts at this point, but you cannot be happy when your feet are sore or you do not have all you want to eat. Or, it would be easy to be happy if the mail would come, or they would "bust" the Mess Sergeant, or take some other great step forward in the improvement of the army. But we all know better.
Our happiness is not dependent on conditions outside of us, but on our hearts within us, and some of the happiest men have been the victims of extraordinary misfortune and some of the unhappiest people have been possessors of great wealth who could have all they wanted. The most joyous book in the world was written by an old man in prison who had come to the conclusion that when they let him out they would chop his head off. Many a man has just grinned himself out of worse fixes than you or I are ever apt to get into.
There are very few things we cannot laugh at. By laughing, we do not actually shorten the hike, but we make it seem shorter; we do not in reality lighten the pack, but we make it seem lighter, and it all comes to the same thing, for we would rather carry a heavy load and have it seem light than carry a light load and have it seem heavy. If we laugh at the cooties when they come, and hunt them with the same merriment [that the French hunt the wild boar,] the joke will be on them after all, for they do not laugh back. And then they won't seem half so bad. Laughter is a good insecticide.
We American soldiers in France are in for a big thing. Just how big it is and how long it will last we do not know and no one can tell us. But we are determined that America shall do her part and that we as individuals shall do ours and be the best soldiers possible, and this is some task when we remember how gallantly our Allies have fought. It will be, in our own language, "some job," and for this reason we must use every means within our power to accomplish it. So we must not forget happiness as an asset to efficient soldiering. We will all smile where the coward would whimper, and laugh where the weakling would whine, and buckle down to what Robert Louis Stevenson called "The great task of happiness."
VOLUNTEER VIC'S BIG IDEA BY LEMEN IN THE
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
