The result was
interesting and worth setting down. My experience was that the good
heart of fighting men was affected by only two avoidable causes. The
first was the large number of young able-bodied men engaged in
occupations, on the lines of communications and at the base, which might
have been carried through effectively by others. These young men never
were in danger, while those who happened to have enlisted in combatant
corps were sent back to face death again and again. This (we are told)
has now been rectified, but it was for long a source of great soreness.
The second influence making for soreness was the amazing amount of
wrangling that went on at home, among the newspapers, between masters
and men, and so on. Officers would get furious with the conduct of the
'workers,' and condemn them wholesale as a class. One had to be at once
cautious and persistent in bringing home to them the fact that their
own men, whom they admired and loved, whom they knew would follow them
anywhere, were drawn from just the same class as those men who were out
on strike. Another reason why it would have been better to have had
older men and married men at the bases lay in the temptations
surrounding the men there on every side.
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