Broome's narration of Neville's schoolboy beating: with the family's only Bible already taken to school by a brother, Neville recited "Take up thy bed and walk", was corrected by the teacher to "couch", could not produce his Bible, and was stripped and beaten.

Neville tells of a woman close to his own age (he refers to her elsewhere in the story as Dora) whose wealthy father — whose actual income no one in the family, not even his wife, ever knew — was killed when she was sixteen, leaving the family with nothing overnight. Unable to bear the pity and mockery of their old social circle, her mother moved what remained of the family to San Diego, where Dora, though a talented artist, could initially find no way to support herself except by waiting tables.

Two weeks after Dora's imagined Christmas Eve voyage on the streetcar, a Chicago law firm wrote her with a $3,000 check: an aunt who had left for Switzerland two years before had arranged that the sum go to her niece if she failed to return or died in the meantime. Within a month Dora used the money to sail, in reality, for Samoa, and as the ship came into the bay on a moonlit night an officer on deck remarked, almost word for word, the very line she had imagined hearing months earlier on the streetcar — "Isn't this a heavenly night."

Walter Lanyon, serving with the 89th Division in France, picked up a copy of a German propaganda leaflet, 'How to Stop the War', dropped in great quantities over the American lines, and enclosed it in a letter to his brother dated 21 October. The Carthage paper printed the letter and reproduced the leaflet in full, under the headline 'WANTED YANKS TO DESERT' and the subhead 'Propaganda, However, Didn't Make Any Impression Upon Americans — Describes Shell Wrecked Church'. Lanyon writes: 'Today an enemy airplane passed over and dropped out a million or so leaflets all over the land — it was German propaganda, and as I came into possession of a copy I am sending it on to you believing it will be interesting to see how completely off [the mark it is].' He describes a church wrecked by shelling, with many of the crosses shattered, and then a grave: 'In a narrow trench, quite close to [me], [is] a German grave — buried where he fell in battle no doubt, and some wit has thrown a string of sausages over the cross which marks his last resting place — and thus the dance goes on.' He calls it making light of that which is serious, jesting with the most sacred of things, and 'smearing the whole land with a great burning hatred which will take ages to remove.' He closes: 'I hope you received your helmets which I sent some days ago, and [am] going to try to get you a camouflaged one which will give you an idea of how far the craze really went.' The leaflet itself, as reproduced, addresses American soldiers directly: 'Do your part to [put] an end to the war! Put an end to your part of it. Stop fighting! That's the simplest [way]. You can do it, you soldiers — just stop fighting and the war will end of its own accord. You are not fighting for anything anyway. What does it [matter to you] who owns Metz or Strassburg? You never saw those towns nor knew the people in them.' It warns that if they keep on fighting 'in the hope of getting a look at those old German fortresses you may never [see] home again', and urges them to 'slip across No Man's Land' to be taken prisoner and 'exchanged and taken home'. The brother's given name is destroyed in the OCR of this clipping.