The Path of Glory by Blanche Colton Williams

STARTING POINT AND FIRST PROCESSES. "It so happens in the case of ‘The Path of Glory' that I can give you exactly the germinal idea from which the story sprang. Three months before I wrote it a friend put into my hand two letters. The first was written by Piatt Andrew of The American Ambulance at Paris and gave the full details of a wonderful funeral accorded a young American volunteer driver who was killed on an early trip; the second was the last personal letter of the young man to his family -- the letter of a young man of education and breeding and in no way similar to the Nat letter of my story save as they both expressed a fundamental human longing. Copies were being made and I was offered some. I carried mine home and laid them by. But they haunted me. ‘There's a story there,' I thought. However, I didn't seem to get a story -- at once. Nevertheless my mind played with the letters. That funeral! The story of course lay there, but how to set it off, enhance it properly. One day thinking it over idly -- I have a vagabond mind and never attack a problem in any logical fashion -- the solution dawned quite suddenly. It would be best set off by contrast, of course, with some unthinkably shabby funeral, and would receive its greatest force by being reconstructed through the minds of a people to whom a funeral is a precious event. " -- _Mary Brecht Pulver._

After a statement to the effect that she knows "people to whom the trappings and ceremonials of death take on a sense of privilege," Mrs. Pulver continues: