Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/45

 of the home are kept strong, many a soldier and sailor will be likely to drift away from his family.

When, therefore, there is any danger of a household breaking up and its members separating, the Red Cross does its best to hold the family together, for nothing could be more demoralizing to a soldier or a sailor than to return from the front and find no place to call his own.

The home of a certain soldier had almost ceased to exist because of this separation of the members of the family. One of his brothers and one of his sisters were living in one part of town, another brother was living with an aunt, and a sister was staying in still another section of the city.

The Home Service worker helped the oldest daughter to find a flat where the children could live together. There, under the leadership of their sister, they are making a home for themselves and for their brother when he returns. This family will be stronger after the war, because it has been reunited.

The life in the trenches, with all its stretches of monotony, is so different from the routine of business; it is so much more exciting; it relieves a man so completely of the necessity of supporting himself and his family, that when the soldier returns to civil life he is tempted, as the experience of our Allies has shown, not to engage in any form of steady employment. The weak man is likely to yield to this temptation unless he finds at home a bracing atmosphere of industry and ambition.

The Red Cross cannot, of course, make a family industrious and ambitious. All the Home Service worker can hope to do is to give the family opportunities to improve itself and to encourage it to take advantage of