But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship.
That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that
comradeship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager
happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than
with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them
poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery
patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of
several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains
normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves,
to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the
human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in
a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It
brings back his cafe evenings, when black horror is reaching out for
him.
If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere
strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home.
Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in
the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely
accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and
at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have
done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing,
and given it a monotony and regularity of its own.
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