"Joe's joking, you know. He's the bravest thing, Carrie; he's joking all the time, and he never complains a bit except about things like having to march miles to be entertained when they're tired out and cold and sleepy."
Kate wrote fat letters to Joe, launched packages of socks and cigarettes and chocolates into space, and lay at night staring with aching eyes at flaming pictures painted on the dark. And Joe wrote back about sleeping in a barn and having a hen lay an egg beside him, and told her that the star shells were pretty, only one couldn't give them calm undivided attention. He never wrote to her about the agony of unbearable, unceasing noise, the exhaustion of long marches when nothing was left conscious but huge feet lead-heavy with mud, carrying them on—where? Of stumbling through mist and fever-mist, tripping over huddled bodies, lost, far behind the others, with a bullet in his thigh, trying to keep up, as Jodie used to try to keep up with the older children.
"Hoagland has ptomaine poisoning from eating lobster in Greenville," Kate wrote to Joe, and Joe wrote back from the base hospital: "Give Hoagland my sympathy, and tell him what I heard J. Hartley Harrison telling a gent from the Bronx—'We're all of us soldiers under the same great Captain, Buddy!'"
And then the endless War was ended. Joe was coming home.
Kate, who had shown smiling courage during the
