Outward Bound

You gentlemen will soon see active service. You will enter into the very crux of battle with our adversaries. I greet your good fortune. Much will be asked of you; much that youth desires, denied. For this is war. Underlying the war is a world sick of hate and of greed — deep-seated poisons beyond the reach of the sword. That also you must face. Nonetheless, I greet your good fortune.

For what is youth, if not to meet a challenge? To you it is given to prove your manhood as few men have proved it. The men of other days who sat beneath these elms faced another world — an ordered, untroubled world in which they had but to enter their chosen spheres. The great heritage of America was theirs at the cheap price of diligence and decent living. You will do battle for what they so lightly took. You will be given the priceless guerdon of earning your own inheritance.

Here it is, your brave adventure— and your ordeal. War is action raised to the nth power. It will measure your worth to the last spark of the fire that is in you. You may face death, and find that a lesser test than the strain and stress of war. Meet this challenge. Give it all that you have, with your blood pulsing full man. And so win your right, as few have won it, to that proudest of boasts: “Civis Americanus sum.”