I am well aware that an increasing number of people nowadays resent all reference to dead soldiers which gives any satisfaction to the survivors. They will not admit that there are any good war memorials, except such narratives as those of Latzko, Duhamel, and Barbusse, such dramas as "What Price Glory?", such poems as Sandburg's "Unknown Soldier," such novels as the "Three Soldiers" of John Dos Passos and Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat," which expose the futility, horror, and degradation of war and bitterly and scornfully asperse every one responsible for sending men into battle. There are even extremists who hold that dead soldiers should be asked to make one more sacrifice for the living and consent to oblivion. I do not hold with them. But their presence and the diffusion among us of mordant skepticism regarding "military glory" render it difficult to write or even to feel quite simply and happily any longer about those who gave "the last full measure of devotion."
Mr. Howe himself has recognized this difficulty. His thin volume of verse, almost privately distributed, "The Known Soldier," from which I have borrowed my title, shows him to have been through the war decade a supporter of the war President, a militant pacifist, who swallowed in good faith the slogan "the war to end war." When in 1918 he undertook these truly monumental memoirs, it was not generally considered an index of subnormal intelligence to believe that benign consequences would flow from the World War. In the preface to his first volume, which appeared in 1920 and dealt with the thirty men who eagerly ran to meet their death before the United States consented to enter the struggle, it was still possible for Mr. Howe
