"And so it was that his mother, in Asheville, North Carolina, asked herself why it was that she, a Carolinian by birth and sympathy, should sacrifice her son in France, and her questions were augmented by similar ones from relatives and friends all over the country. Kiffin, though gloriously dead, might have been saved, it seemed. She had tried to save him from himself by persistent entreaties to the Department of State in Washington to get her boy out of the French army, and by similarly persistent demands to the French Government to release her son. But before Kiffin fell she had come to see what he was fighting for, and it was not long after he fell before she was a sister in suffering to thousands of other American mothers who likewise had come to see why it was that their sons had to die in France..."