The men, despite "laughing and cheering and making obscene gestures" are, in reality, feeling anything but jovial: "they hate it." This is fighting they are getting into, with bayonets aimed at real men and aimed back. These brutal experiences will be their reality, yet the most legitimate emotions that such anticipation might inspire--fear, angst, second thoughts--must be stifled. The men willingly suspend valid but invalidated emotions and forge an outlook on what they soon will be experiencing that camouflages a more conflicted state of mind. The gender codes, then, appear to the gendered subject as more legitimate than the private feelings they eclipse in the service of upholding a compulsory masculinity.
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