f
children.

"Don't forget we are only little ones," they say. "We don't die; we are
just at play."

"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"

Where does the comfort of the trenches lie? What solace do the soldiers
find for a weary life of unemployment and for sudden death? Of course,
they find it in the age-old things that have always sufficed, or, if
these things do not here altogether suffice, at least they help. For a
certain few out of every hundred men, religion avails. Some of our dying
men were glad of the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems. The
quiet devout men continued faithful as they had been at home. Art is
playing the true part it plays at all times of fundamental need. The men
busy themselves with music, with carving, and drawing. Security and
luxury destroy art, for it is no longer a necessity when a man is
stuffed with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot compartments from
point to point of a tame world. But when he tumbles in from a gusty
night out of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers of shell,
then he turns to song and color, odd tricks with the knife, and the
tales of an ancient adventure. After our group had brought food and
clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with which one of the
privates presented to our head nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of
the Yser.

But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship.
That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that
comradeship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager
happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than
with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them
poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery
patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of
several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains
normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves,
to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the
human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in
a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It
brings back his cafe evenings, when black horror is reaching out for
him.

If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere
strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home.
Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in
th