Page:Aldrich - The Peak of the Load.djvu/14

 entrance of the States into the ranks of the Allies, there are plenty who are still optimistic about the war's duration, and who smile, and say: "Don't fret. Your boys will march in the triumphal procession. The generous aid the States have given us earns them that right, but they cannot get ready to fire their guns in time to do much at the front."

I hope you will take it in the right spirit when I say I don't want it to end like that, and I am sure it won't. Personally I think the end is a long way off, and I can't tell you how our boys are needed. Besides, put it at the fact that Fate is to take a proportionate toll from our army—the other nations will have had nearly four years, if not quite four, before our losses begin.

Our men are going to leave their women and children in safety, in a land that can never know the horrors of invasion. I don't want to dwell on that idea, but it is a comfort all the same.

You say in your last that our boys are coming across the ocean "to die in a foreign land." Yes, I know. But they are coming to a country where they are already loved. Wonderful preparations are going to be made to care for them, and I do believe the United States, as a government and as a people, is going to make the great sacrifice—economic, material and spiritual—which the situation demands of her in a manner which will make us all proud of her as a nation and will set a seal of nobility on the future of the race and place our sort of democracy in the front ranks for ever.