Kisses were for the present, the all too fleeting present; and he had to concern himself with what he might do for one girl's future.

It was exquisitely sad and sweet to put it that way, though Kurt knew that if he had never seen Lenore Anderson he would have gone to war just the same.

He was not making an abstract sacrifice.
The wheat-fields rolling before him, every clod of which had been pressed by his bare feet as a boy; the father whose changeless blood had sickened at the son of his loins; the life of hope, freedom, of action, of achievement, of wonderful possibility--these seemed lost to Kurt Dorn, a necessary renunciation when he yielded to the call of war.
But no loss, no sting of bullet or bayonet, no torturing victory of approaching death, could balance in the scale against the thought of a picture of one American girl--blue-eyed, red-lipped, golden-haired--as she stepped somewhere in the future, down a summer lane or through a blossoming orchard, on soil that was free..