He remembered that years
ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old
lines:
"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more--"
Yet here it was, a truth in his own life. A woman meaning more to him
than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go
forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her. It was for her,
and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.
"If only they could understand it," he wrote to Jean. "You haven't any
idea what rotten letters some of the women write. Blaming the men for
going over seas. Blaming them for going into it at all. Taking it as
a personal offense that their lovers have left them. 'If you had loved
me, you couldn't have left me,' was the way one woman put it, and I
found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter.
'It isn't a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what
we've got to do, if we call ourselves men,' he said. But she couldn't
see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule.
"But, thank God, most of the women are the real thing--true as steel
and brave.
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