Americans marching
Another one from Mr. Steinbeck that I meant to post Tuesday:
It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don't have to. Every holiday draws millions of marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march, clad in any imaginable outlandish costume, carrying heavy banners with them too. Everything from Saint Patrick's Day to the Grandmothers of America, Inc., draws milling marchers; but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they will wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers. Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed. He lives for the day when he can get out of uniform, and once out spends a large part of his future life at reunions, conventions, marching his heart out while his uniform gets tighter and tighter, and his collar and waistband torture him. Then the war he loathed becomes the great time of his life, and he can conscientiously bore his wife and children to death with it.