The Coconino sun., 1919-01-10
A CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM THE A. E. F.
 TO AMERICA

The Rnlneland, Chflstmas, 1918. Dear America:
 Your sons are coming home. The task you set before them is nearly done, and now, Hay by day, week by week, month by month, your ships are bringing us home.
 If we have done well it was for love of you. Dimly we understood that we had been sent forth to slay something, which if it throve unchecked, would one day reach out across the seas and destroy you. Very clearly we under stood that by ourselves would you be judged among the free peoples; that the hour had struck for us to show mankind the mettle of our pasture. And believe this-there was not one of us who did not walk a little straighter, live a little cleaner, work a. little better, fight little harder on that account. Nanny" a stevedore wrote in his Mothers Day Letter last spring, q want folks to see your raising in me-" America, it was so with every one of us. We wanted all the world to see your raising in us.
 And this is written just to tell you that those ships will bring back more than 100000 men, every one better citizen than when we sailed away.
 Better citizens, because we know each other better. Rich and poor, high and low, rough and polished, East and West, North and South-the war has mixed us all together. Alabama and Iowa have joined to form single brigade, and what a brigade! Oregon has fought shoulder to shoulder with New York and means more to New York than ever she meant-than ever she could have meant-before.
 Better citizens because many of us almost a million of us-have, for a time, dwelt in that community spirit which nowhere in this workaday world is quite so animate as it was in that strange, simple country which was called the front.
 Above all, better citizens because you, America, mean more to us than ever before. For one thing we have had to learn what it is to do without you. Some for a little while, others for interminable months, we have been obliged to do without you. Of course, the whole A. F.. F.-though we have tried to hide it in our letters has been as abysmally homesick as the most jealous mother could have wished. But surely that was no bad thing.
 Then, too, we have seen such shin ing things done in your name. We who were at Chateau -Thierry and northwest of Verdun have seen men in olive drab and forest green beside us show themselves made of such stuff as taught us a new wonder for the land that could breed them. There were some of us who had to set forth from our own front gate and journey all the way to the Marne to discover America.
 We of this generation had come to take our country for granted. We had come to take our liberty as a matter of course, like the air we breathed and the unfailing sun. It was not so with the generations that wrung the first homesteads from the wilderness. It was not so with the generation that conceived the nation in liberty and dedicated it to the prop oSitiOll tlIdI dil iIti dlt Nttabtu S1uuts It was not so with the generation that fought a civil war to prove whether that nation, or any nation, so conceiv- ed and so dedicated, could long en- dure. But We've of the easy spring of 1917-were like the idle sons of some rich man, interiors of for tune which only he could value who had by toll and sacrifice amassed it. Now we have done more than inherit the treasure. We have earned it. We were children of a great estate. We have added to it.
 And so, dear America, we write you from the Rhine. In the name of those who cannot return, in the name of the best of all, those who lie beside the Marne and the Ourcq and the Vesle and the Aire and the Mouse, we wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. The American soldier sends you his love.
 fr ..e#.. A. E. F.
 Stars and Stripes.