Our men, still thinking of home, are impatient with the strange peoples and customs of the countries they now inhabit.  They say that if they ever get home they never want to see another foreign country.  But I know how it will be.  The day will come when they’ll look back and brag about how they learned a little Arabic, and how swell the girls were in England, and how pretty the hills of Germany were.  Every day their scope is broadening despite themselves, and once they all get back with their global yarns and their foreign-tinged views, I cannot conceive of our nation ever being isolationist again.  The men don’t feel very international right now, but the influences are at work and the time will come.

I couldn’t say truthfully that they are very much interested in foreign affairs right now, outside of battle affairs.  Awhile back a friend of mine in Washington wrote me an enthusiastic letter, telling of the Ball Resolution in the Senate calling for the formation of a United Nations organization to co-ordinate the prosecution of the war, administer reoccupied countries, feed and economically re-establish liberated nations, and to assemble a United Nations military force to suppress any future military aggression.

My friend told of the enthusiasm the bill had created at home, hailed it as the first definite step in winning the peace as well as the war, and asked me almost pleadingly to send back a report on what the men at the front thought of the bill.

I didn’t send any report, because the men at the front thought very little about it one way or the other.  I doubt that one out of ten of them remembered the thing two days, even though they may have read about it in Stars and Stripes.  There wasn’t anything specific to get their teeth into and argue about.  It sounded too much like another Atlantic Charter or committee meeting.

Of course, by digging, a person could find plenty of politically and internationally minded men in our army—all the way from generals to privates—who do spend considerable time thinking of what is to come after the victory, and how we are to handle it.  But what I’m trying to get over is that the bulk of our army in Africa, the run-of-the-mine mass of soldiers, didn’t think twice about this bill if they heard of it at all.  Their thoughts on the peace can be summed up, I believe, in a general statement that after this war is won they want it fixed so it can’t happen again and they want a hand in fixing it, but our average guy has no more conception of how it should be done than to say he supposes some kind of world police force is the answer.  There is a great deal more talk along the line of, “Those bluenoses back home better not try to put prohibition over on us while we’re away this time,” than you hear about bills and resolutions looking toward the postwar world.