308 BANQUET. 



one of the most remarkable little letters I ever read. Her boy had come to Camp Merritt, en 

 route to foreign service, and then had quit and gone back home. She wrote and said that 

 she had begged her boy tO' return, but she could not convince him that he ought to do it ; she 

 had prayed over the matter, an,d she felt that she was doing her duty by reporting her boy 

 as a deserter. You cannot lick a people when they have such spirit as that. (Applause.) 



There was another little incident, quite out of the ordinary, I think, and quite pleasing 

 in its ending. One day last January, when we tried to rush the return of our troops to the 

 maximum, I opened a letter postmarked Detroit, and the first thing that fell out of the en- 

 velope on my desk was a picture, clipped from a newspaper, and the picture represented a 

 ferryboat crowded with soldiers. You never saw so many soldiers in all your life on one 

 ferryboat; and in the front, leaning over the rail, was one soldier whose face was unusu- 

 ally clear in the picture — he was rather emaciated, he looked as if he had been ill, and on the 

 cap of the soldier and down on his blouse, beneath his chin, the writer had made a cross mark, 

 as if to draw particular attention to that soldier. When I looked at the letter that accom- 

 panied the picture, it was in a scrawling handwriting, and in the simple words of a school- 

 girl, and it read something like this : 



"General Shanks : My mother tells me to send you this picture. We think it is a pic- 

 ture of my brother, but the War Department wrote us that he was killed in Flanders last 

 October. But, General Shanks, my mother wishes to tell you she knows that is her boy. 

 Can you help us?" 



The picture had been sO' closely trimmed that the name of the paper and the date of 

 its publication was missing, but the girl had signed her name to the letter. I sent for our 

 transportation officer, who had charge of the list of soldiers returning, and asked him to see 

 if he could not go back and find that name, and within four hours he came back and said 

 that he had found the name. Then we drafted a telegram that, of all the thousands that 

 ever went through the port with my name to them, gave me most pleasure. It told the 

 mother her son was in Greenhut's hospital, that he had been wounded, but was rapidly get- 

 ting better, and would leave for home within a few days. (Applause.) 



Sometimes the letters were a little different from that. There was a soldier at Camp 

 Merritt whose courage failed him about the time he got there. The poor fellow could not 

 write, so he got somebody to write a letter on the typewriter for him, and he put in an appli- 

 cation for his discharge. He said he had a family in Oklahoma, that his duty called him 

 back to his wife and children, and in conclusion said : — "To vouch for this, I enclose a letter 

 from my wife, and it will tell you all about it." As he could not read or write, he did not 

 know what he was enclosing, and when I read the letter from his wife, it was something 

 like this : — 



"General Shanks : Dan cannot read and you need not tell him what I say, but me and 

 the children need the space he takes and the vittles he eats. If you can make any use of him, 

 please keep him and you are welcome to him." (Applause.) 



