Excerpt from The American Spirit
I have been asked why I left a comfortable home and a good business at the age of fifty-six, to accept a commission as second lieutenant, when the war broke out, while boys half my age were going as first lieutenants and captains; and why, after being honorably discharged from an officers" training camp for over-age, I went to so much trouble to get back in again? "If papa had to go it would be different," one of my married daughters remarked somewhat disgustedly. The leading question in a popular army song is, "Why - she done it?" I haven"t stopped before to consider my answer. but as I have in mind to put the whole story on paper before it fades from memory, let me begin far enough back to get a good running jump at the solution. Family tradition and ideals do much to influence those who happen to know about them - in fact, the influence of an ideal is the greatest human incentive:
Descendants of the Puritans who first set foot on Plymouth Rock,
The honor and chief burden yours that Doors of Freedom still unlock.
For several years before the memorable summer of 1914. I had interested myself, as a diversion, in working out the genealogy of our family. On mother"s side we were Puritans, descended from John Howland and Elizabeth Tillie, who came over in the Mayflower in 1620. I had helped to organize an Indiana Mayflower Society. and as its historian read much about the trials and triumphs of that first New England colony whose great work has so influenced the highest ideals of the world:
They gave us Liberty of Speech, and right to publish as we thought,
Implanting rev"rence for a God, in worship as our conscience taught.
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