Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/11

 for the families of soldiers and sailors as well as for the family of anybody else.

Here, for example, are some of the things which have happened to these families during the absence of their men at the front, in camp, or on the ocean. A few weeks after a certain soldier enlisted, a moving van drew up before the door of his home in order to take from it the furniture he had been buying upon the installment plan. The mother of a man in the ambulance corps found after he had gone to the front that what she had thought to be indigestion was cancer. The sister of another developed tuberculosis. The national guardsman who had expected to be with his wife when their first baby was born was in camp hundreds of miles away at the time that the new mother needed him most. A widow, who had said good-bye to her son apparently cheerfully enough, worried so much about him that her health was endangered. The wife of a sailor who before the days of his enlistment had been chiefly responsible for the family discipline found it so difficult to manage her three young sons that in despair she considered sending them to an institution, One of two young men who had been managing the farm of their aged parents was drafted; two weeks after his departure the remaining son died, just at harvest time. The relatives in whose charge a soldier had left his wife proved to be unscrupulous; they made her a household drudge and forced her to give them all the money her husband sent her.

Things do indeed happen to the folks at home. The soldier or the sailor recognizes that this is inevitable. His real anxiety is not so much that things may happen as that when they do happen he cannot be there to help