And I am certain that last of all I should have heard the voice of the Master himself saying:
"Insomuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these little ones, my children, ye have done it unto me."
Thank God for a death like that. One could envy such a passing, a passing in the service to little children.
I have seen some of the most magnificent episodes of service on the part of men in France, scenes that have thrilled me to the bone.
I know a Protestant clergyman in France who walked five miles on a rainy February day to find a rosary for a dying Catholic boy.
I know a Y. M. C. A. secretary who in America is the general secretary of one of the largest organizations in one of the largest Eastern cities. He has always had two hobbies: one is seeing men made whole, and the other has been fighting cigarettes. Never bigger fists or more determined fists pounded down the walls that were building themselves up around American youth in the cigarette industry. He was militant from morning till night in his crusade against cigarettes. Some of his friends thought he was a fanatic. He even lost friends because of his uncompromising antagonism to the cigarette.
But the last time I heard of him he was in a front-line dugout. This was near Château-Thierry. The boys were coming and going from that awful fight. Men would come in one day and be dead the next. He had been with them for months, and they had come to love him in spite of his fighting their favorite pastime. They knew him for his uncompromising antagonism to cigarettes. They loved him none the less for that because he did not flinch. Neither was he narrow about selling them. He sold them because it was his duty, but he hated them.
Then for three days in the midst of the Château-Thierry fighting the matches played out. Not a match was to be had for three days. The boys were frantic for their smokes, for the nervous strain was greater than anything they had suffered in their lives. The shelling was awful. The noise never ceased. Machine-gun fire and bombing by planes at night kept up every hour. They saw lifelong friends fall by their sides every hour of the day and night. They needed the solace of their smokes.
Their secretary found two matches in his bag. He lit a cigarette for a boy, and the match was gone. Then he used the other one. Then he did a magnificent piece of service for which his name shall go down forever in the memory of those lads. Forever shall he hold their affections in the hollow of his hands. He proved to those boys that his sense of service was greater than his prejudices. He kept three cigarettes going for two days and two nights on the canteen beside him, smoking them himself in order that that crowd of boys, coming and going into the battle, in and out of the underground dugout, might have a light for the cigarettes during the few moments of respite that they had from the fight.
What a thrill went down the line when that news got to the boys out there in the woods fighting. One boy told me that a fellow he told wept when he heard it. Another said: "Good old ——! I knew he had the guts!" Another said: "I'll say he's a man!" Another came in one evening and said: "I'm going to quit cigarettes from now. If you're that much of a man, you're worth listening to!" Another said: "If I get out of this it's me for the church forever if it has that kind of men in it!"
Is it any wonder that they brought their last letters to him before they went into the trenches? Is it any wonder that they asked him for a little prayer service one night before they went into the trenches? Is it any wonder that they love him and swear by him?
Is it any wonder that when one of them was asked how they liked their secretary, the boy said: "Great! He's a man!"
Is it any wonder that when another boy was asked if their secretary was very religious, responded in his own language: "Yes, he's as religious as hell, but he's a good guy anyhow!"
That kind of service will win anybody, and that is exactly the kind of service that the boys of the American army, your boys, are getting all over France from big, heroic, unprejudiced, fatherly, brotherly men, who are willing to die for their boys as well as to live for them and with them down where the shells are thickest and the dangers are constant.
More than a hundred Y. M. C. A. men gassed and wounded to date, and more than six killed. One friend of mine stepped down into his cellar one morning, got a full breath of gas, and was dead in two minutes. There had been a gas-raid the day before, and the gas had remained in the cellar. Another I know stayed in his hut and served his men even though six shell fragments came through the hut while he was doing it. Another I know lived in a dugout for three months, under shell fire every day. One day a shell took off the end of the old château in which he was serving the men. His dugout was in the cellar. But he did not leave. Another day another shell took off the other end of the château, but he did not leave. He had no other place to go, and the boys couldn't leave, so why should he go just because he could leave if he wished? That was the way he looked at it. One man whom I interviewed in Paris, a Baptist clergyman, crawled four hundred yards at the Château-Thierry battle with a young lieutenant, dragging a litter with them across a stubble wheat-field under a rain of machine-gun bullets and shells, in plain view of the Germans, and rescued a wounded colonel. When they brought him back they had to crawl the four hundred yards again, pushing the litter before them inch by inch. It took them two hours to get across that field. A piece of shrapnel went through the secretary's shoulder. He is nearly sixty years of age, but he did not stop when a service called him that meant the almost certain loss of his own life.
I know another secretary, Doctor Dan Poling, a clergyman, and Pest, a physical director, who carried a wounded German, who had two legs broken, through a barrage of German shells across a field to safety.
But all the Silhouettes of Service are not in the front lines.
There are two divisions to the army. They used to be "The Zone of Advance" and "The Zone of the Rear." Now they call the second division "The Services of Supplies." All the men who are not in the actual fighting belong to "The Services of Supplies."
"How many men does it take to keep one pilot in the machine flying out over those waters to guard the transports in?" I asked the young ensign in charge of a seaplane station.
"Twenty-eight," he replied. "There are twenty-eight men back of every machine and every pilot."
The service that these men render, although it is hard for them to see it, is just as real and just as heroic as the service of those in the front lines. The boys in "The Services of Supplies" are eager to get up front. I have had the joy of making them see in their huts and camps that their service is supremely important.
One cannot tell what service is more important.
When I landed at Newport News, the first sound that I heard was the machine-gun hammering of thousands of riveters building ships. I know how vital that service is to the boys "over there." They could not live without the ships.
Then I came from Newport News to Washington, on my way home, and we entered that great city by night. The Capitol dome was flooded with light. As I looked at it I said to myself: "To-day from this city emanates the light of the world. The eyes of the whole of humanity are turned toward this city. That lighted dome is symbol of all this."
As I looked out of the train window as we entered Washington from Richmond, Virginia, I thought: "Surely not the shipbuilding but the ideals that go out from the Capitol are the most important 'Services of Supplies.'"
The next morning I was in Pittsburgh. As my train pulled into that great city, all along the Ohio River I saw great armies of laboring men going and coming from work. As one tide of humanity flowed out of the mills across the bridges, another flowed in, and I said: "Surely not the shipbuilders, nor the ideal-makers at Washington, but this great army of laboring men in America forms the most important part of 'The Services of Supplies'!"
Then I came to New York. In turn I spoke before two significant groups of men and women. One was a group of women meeting each day to make Red Cross bandages, and knowing the scarcity of such in France, and knowing how at times nurses have had to tear up their skirts to bandage wounds of dying boys, I said: "Surely this is it!"
Then I spoke before the artists of New York, with Mr. Charles Dana Gibson heading them, and as I had seen their stirring posters everywhere arousing the nation to action, and knew what an important part the artists and writers in France had played in "The Services of Supplies," I said: "Surely these are the most important!"
But I have found at last that none of these are the most important of all. There is another section to "The Services of Supplies," and that is more important than the mechanic behind the pilot, more important than the man who assembles the motor trucks and the ambulances in France, more important than the ship-builders, more important than the lawmakers themselves, more important even than the President, more important than that great army of laborers which I saw in Pittsburgh, more important than the artists and the Red Cross workers, and that supreme and important part of the great "Services of Supplies" is the father and mother, the wife, the child, the home, the church, the great mass of the common thinking, feeling, suffering, praying, hoping people of America. If these fail, all fails. If these lose faith and courage and hope, all lose faith and courage and hope. If these grow faint-hearted, all before them lose heart. These are they who furnish the real sinews of war. These are they who must furnish the morale, the love, the letters, the prayers, the support to both government and soldier. Yes, the common folks over here at home, I have seen clearly, are the most important part of the great division of the army that we call "The Services of Supplies." May we never fail the boy in France.
These are the Silhouettes of Service.
I wondered at his hold on the hearts of the boys in a certain hospital in France. It was a strange thing. I went through the hospital with him and it seemed to me, judging by the conversation with the boys in the hundreds of cots, that he had just done something for a boy, or he was just in the process of doing something, or he was just about to do something.
They called him "daddy."
All day long I wondered at his secret, for he was so unlike any man I had seen in France in the way he had won the hearts of the boys. I was curious to know. Something in his eyes made me think of Lincoln. They had a look like Lincoln in their depths.
That night when I was about to leave I blunderingly stumbled on his secret. About the only ornament in his bare pine room in the hut was a picture on the desk. I seized on it immediately, for next to a sweet-faced baby about the finest thing on earth to look at is a boy between five and twelve. And here were two, dressed in plaid suits, with white collars, tousled hair, clean, fine American boys.
I exclaimed as I picked the picture up:
"What a fine pair of lads!"
Then I knew that I had, unwittingly, stumbled into his secret, for a look of infinite pain swept over his face.
"They are both dead. Last August wife called me on the phone and said that something awful had happened to the boys. They were all we had, and I hurried home.
"They had gone out on a Boy Scout picnic. The older had gone in swimming in the river and had gotten beyond his depth. The younger went in after him and both were drowned."
"I'm sorry I brought it back," I said humbly.
He didn't notice what I said, but went on.
"Wife and I were broken-hearted. There didn't seem much to live for. We had lost all. Then came this Y. M. C. A. work, and we thought that we would like to come over here and do for all the boys in the army what we could not do for our own. And now wife and I are here, and every time I do something for a wounded boy in this hospital, I feel as if I were serving my own dear lads."
"And you are," I said. "And if the mothers and fathers of America know that men and women of your type are here looking after their lads it will give them a new sense of comfort and you will be serving them also."
"And my wife," he added. "You know the boys up at —— call her 'The Woman with the Sandwiches and Sympathy.' She got her name because one night a drunken soldier staggered into the hut and asked for her. He didn't remember her name, but she had darned his socks, she had written letters for him, she had mothered him, she had tried to help him. They wanted to put the poor lad out, but he insisted upon seeing my wife. Finally, in desperation, seeing that he couldn't think of her name, he said, 'Wan' see that woman wif sandwiches and sympathy,' and after that the name stuck."
"The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwiches and Sympathy.'"[Illustration: "The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwichesand Sympathy.'"]
"The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwiches and Sympathy.'"[Illustration: "The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwichesand Sympathy.'"]
And as we knelt in prayer together there in the hut and I arose to clasp his hand in sympathy, I knew that through service there in France, through service to your sons, mothers and fathers of America, this brave man, as well as his wife, were solacing their grief. They were conquering sorrow in service, thank God.
Yes, there are Silhouettes of Sorrow, but these silhouettes always have back of them the gold of a new dawn of hope. They are black silhouettes, but they have a glorious background of sunrise and hope. I tell of no sorrows here that are not triumphant sorrows, such as will hearten the whole world to bear its sorrow well when it comes, pray God.
Up at —— on the beautiful Loire is my friend the secretary. It is a humble position, and there are not many soldiers there, but he is serving and brothering, tenderly and faithfully, the few that are there. No one would ever think of him as a hero, but I do. He, too, is a hero who is conquering sorrow in service.
His only daughter had been accepted for Y. M. C. A. service in France. She was all he had. He was a minister at home, and had given up his church for the duration of the war. Both were looking forward with keen anticipation to her coming to France. Then came the cable of her death.
I was there, the morning it arrived, to preach for him. He said no word to me about the blow. We went on with the service as usual. I noticed that no hymns had been selected, and that things were not in very good order for the service. I was a little annoyed at this, but I am thankful with all my heart this day that I said nothing. I had decided in my heart that he was not a very efficient religious director until I heard the next day.
When I asked him why he had not told me, he said a characteristic thing: "I didn't want to spoil the service. I thought I would keep my grief in my own heart and fight it out alone."
And fight it out he did. Letters kept coming for several weeks after the cable, letters full of girlish hope about France, and full of joy at the thoughts of seeing "daddy" soon. This was the hardest of all. He could not tear up those precious letters. Her last words and thoughts were treasures; all that he had left; but they were spear-thrusts of pain also. But bravely he fought out his battle of grief, and tenderly he ministered, mothers and fathers of America, to your boys. Is it any wonder that they loved him, that they went to him with their loneliness and their heartaches; is it any wonder that he understood all the troubles that they brought and that they bring to him?
And then there was the young secretary who had just landed in France. It had been hard to leave home, especially hard to leave that little tot of a six-year-old girl, the apple of his eye.
Some of us who have such experiences will understand this story; some of us who remember what the parting from loved ones meant when we went to France. One such I remember vividly.
There was the night before in the hotel in San Francisco, when "Betty," six-year-old, said, "Don't cry, mother. Be brave like Betty," and who even admonished her daddy in the same way, "Don't cry, daddy! Be brave like Betty!" for it was just as hard for the daddy to keep the tears back, as he thought of the separation, as it was for the mother.
Then the daddy would say to the mother: "I feel ashamed of myself to cry when I think of the thousands of daddies and husbands who are leaving their homes, not for six months' or a year's service, but 'for the period of the war,' and leaving with so much more of a cloud hanging over them than I. I have every hope that I will be back with you in six or eight months, but they——"
"Yes, but your own grief will make you understand all the better what it means to the daddies in the army who leave their babies and their wives, and oh, dear, be good to them!"
Then there was the next morning at the Oakland pier as the great transcontinental train pulled out, when the little six-year-old lady for the first time suddenly saw what losing her daddy meant. She hadn't visualized it before. Consequently, she had been brave, and had even boasted of her bravery. But now she had nothing to be brave about, for as the train started to move she suddenly burst into sobs and started down the platform after the train as fast as her sturdy little legs could carry her, crying between sobs, "Come back, daddy! Come back to Betty! Don't go away!" with her mother after her.
The daddy had no easy time as he watched this tragedy of childhood from the observation-car. It was a half-hour before he dared turn around and face the rest of the sympathetic passengers.
Going back on the ferry to San Francisco the weeping did not cease. In fact it became contagious, for a kindly old gentleman, thinking that the little lady was afraid of the boat, said: "What's the matter, dear? Are you afraid?"
"No, sir, I'm not afraid; but my daddy's gone to France, and I want him back! I want my daddy! I want my daddy!" and the storm burst again. Then here and there all over the boat the women wept. Here and there a man pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pretended to blow his nose.
And so we understand what it meant to this young secretary when, upon landing in France, he got the cable telling of the death of his baby girl.
At first he was stunned by the blow.
Then came a brave second cable from his wife telling him that there was nothing that he could do at home; to stay at his contemplated task of being a friend to the boys.
The brave note in the second cable gave him new spirit and new courage, and in spite of a heavy heart he went into a canteen, and will any wonder who read this story that he has won the undying devotion of his entire regiment by his tireless self-sacrificing service to the American boys?
What triumphs these are, what triumphs over sorrow and pain.
All of France is filled with these Silhouettes of Sorrow, but each has a background of triumphant, dawning light.
There was the woman and child that I saw in the Madeleine in Paris, both in black. They walked slowly up the steps and in through the great doors to pray for their daddy aviator, who had been killed a year before.
A man at the door told me that every day they come, that every day they keep fresh the memory of their loved one.
"But why does she come so long after he is dead?" I asked.
"She comes to pray for the other aviators," he added simply.
It was a tremendous thing to me. I went into the great, beautiful cathedral and reverently knelt beside them in love and thankfulness that no harm had come to my own wife and baby. But the memory of that woman's brave pilgrimage of prayer each day for a year, "for the other aviators," the picture of the woman and child kneeling, etched its way into my soul to remain forever.
"As I shot down through the night, falling to what I was certain was immediate death, I had just one thought," a young aviator said, as we sat talking in a hotel in Paris.
I said: "What was it?"
"I said to myself: 'What will the poor kiddie do without his dad?"'
Then there is that Silhouette of Sorrow that my friend brought back from Germany, he who was on the Peace Ship Commission, and who saw a train-load of German boys leaving a certain German town to fill in the gaps caused by the losses at Verdun; and because this sorrow is characteristic of the mother sorrow of the whole world, and especially of the American mother, and because it has a note of wonderful triumph, I tell it.
"I thought they were the hardest women in the world," he said, "for as I watched them saying farewell to their boys there wasn't a tear. There was laughter everywhere, shouting and smiles, as if those poor boys were going off to school, or to a picnic, when we all knew that they were going to certain death.
"I felt like cursing their indifference to the common impulses of motherhood. I watched a thousand mothers and women as that train started, and I didn't see a tear. They stood waving their hands and smiling until the train was out of sight. I turned in disgust to walk away when a woman near me fainted, and I caught her as she fell. Then a low moan went up all over that station platform. It was as if those mothers moaned as one. There was no hysteria, just a low moan that swept over them. I saw dozens of them sink to the floor unconscious. They had kept their grief to themselves until their lads had gone. They had sent their boys away with a smile, and had kept their heartache buried until those lads had departed."
I think that this is characteristic of the triumphant motherhood of the whole world. It is a Silhouette of Sorrow, but it has a background of the golden glory of bravery which is the admiration of all the world. A recent despatch says that a woman, an American, sent her boy away smiling a few weeks ago, and then dropped dead on the station, dead of grief.
One who has lived and worked in France has silhouette memories of funeral processions standing out in sombre blackness against a lurid nation. He has memories of funeral trains in little villages and in great cities; he has memories of brave men standing as doorkeepers in hotels, with arms gone, with crosses for bravery on their breasts, but somehow the cloud of sorrow is always fringed with gold and silver. He has memories of funeral services in Notre Dame and the Madeleine, and in little towns all over France, but in and around them all there is somewhere the glory of sunlight, of hope, of courage. Indeed, one cannot have silhouettes, even of sorrow, if there is no background of light and hope.
For we know that even in war-time God "still makes roses," as John Oxenham, the English poet, tells us:
"Man proposes—God disposes;Yet our hope in Him reposesWho in war-time still makes roses."
John Oxenham, one of the outstanding poets of the war, wrote this verse, and for me it has been a sort of a motto of faith during my service in France. I have quoted it everywhere I have spoken, and it has sung its way into my heart, like a benediction with its comfort and its assurance.
It has been surprising, too, the way the boys have grasped at it. I have quoted it to them privately, in groups, and in great crowds down on the line, and back in the rest-camps, and in the ports, and everywhere I have quoted it I have had many requests to give copies of it to the boys. I quoted it once in a negro hut, hesitating before I did so lest they should not appreciate it enough to make quoting it excusable. But I took a chance.
When the service was over a long line of intelligent-looking negro boys waited for me. I thought that they just wanted to shake hands, but much to my astonishment most of them wanted to know if I would give them a copy of that verse, and so I was kept busy for half an hour writing off copies of that brief word of faith.
One never quite knows all that this verse means until he has been in France and has seen the suffering, the heartache, the loneliness, the mud, and dirt and hurt; the wounds and pain and death which are everywhere.
Then he turns from all the suffering to find a blood-red poppy blooming in the field behind him; or a million of them covering a green field like a great blanket. These poppies are exactly like our golden California poppies. Like them they grow in the fields and along the hedges; even covering the unsightly railroad-tracks, as if they would hide the ugly things of life.
I thought to myself: "They look as if they had once been our golden California poppies, but that in these years of war every last one of them had been dipped in the blood of those brave lads who have died for us, and forever after shall they be crimson in memory of these who have given so much for humanity."
One day in early June I was driving through Brittany along the coast of the Atlantic. On the road we passed many old-fashioned men, and women in their little white bonnets and their black dresses.
We stopped at a beautiful little farmhouse for lunch. It attracted us because of its serene appearance and its cleanliness. A gray-haired little old woman was in the yard when we stopped our machine.
The yard was literally sprinkled with blood-red poppies. As we walked in and were making known our desire for lunch a beautiful girl of about twenty-five, dressed in mourning, stepped to the doorway, her black eyes flashing a welcome, and cried out: "Welcome, comrade Americaine." Behind her was a little girl, her very image.
I guessed at once that in this quiet Brittany home the war had reached out its devastating hand. I had remarked earlier in the day as we drove along: "It is all so quiet and beautiful here, with the old-gold broom flowering everywhere on hedge and hill, and with the crimson poppies blowing in the wind, that it doesn't seem as if war had touched Brittany."
A friend who knew better said: "But have you not noticed that women are pulling the carts, women are tilling the fields? Look at that woman over there pulling a plough. Have you not noticed that there are no men but old men everywhere?"
He was right. I could not remember to have seen any young men, and everywhere women were working in the field, and in one place a woman was yoked up with an ox, ploughing, while a young girl drove the odd pair.
"And if that isn't enough, wait until we come to the next cathedral and I'll show you what corresponds to our 'Honor Rolls' in the churches back home. Then you'll know whether war has touched Brittany or not."
We entered with reverent hearts the next ancient cathedral of Brittany, in a little town with a population of only about two thousand, we were told, and yet out of this town close to five hundred boys had been killed in the Great War. Their names were posted, written with many a flourish by some village penman. In the list I saw the names of four brothers who had been killed, and their father. The entire family had been wiped out, all but the women.
So I was mistaken. As quiet and peaceful as Brittany was during May and June, as beautiful with broom and poppies as were its fields, it had not gone untouched by the cruel hand of war. It, too, had suffered, as has every hamlet, village, and corner of fair France; suffered grievously.
Thus I was not surprised to hear that this beautiful young woman was wearing black because her husband had been killed, and that the little girl behind her in the doorway had no longer any hope that her soldier daddy would some day come home and romp with her as of old. At the lunch we were told all about it. True, there were tears shed in the telling, and these not alone by these brave Frenchwomen and the little girl, but it was a sweet, simple story of courage. Several times during its telling the little girl ran over to kiss the tears out of her mother's eyes, and to say, with such faith that it thrilled us: "Never mind, mother, the Américains are here now; they will kill the cruel Boches."
After dinner we walked amid the red poppies in the great lawn that was the crowning feature of that white-stone home. On the walls of the ancient house grew the most wonderful roses that I have ever seen anywhere, not excepting California. Great white roses, so large and fragrant that they seemed unreal, delicately moulded red roses, which unfolded like a baby's lips, climbed those ancient stone walls. The younger woman cared for them herself, and was engaged in that task of love even before we went away.
I said to her, in what French I could command: "They are the most beautiful roses I have ever seen."
"Even in your own beautiful America?" she asked with a smile.
"Yes, more beautiful even than in my own America."
"Yes," she said, "they are most beautiful, but they are more than that; they are full of hope for me. They are my promise that I shall see him some time again. They come back each spring. He loved them and cared for them when he was alive. Even on his leave in 1915 he gloried in them. And when they come back each spring they seem to come to give me promise that I shall see him again."
Then I translated Oxenham's verses about the roses for her. The translation was poor, but she caught the idea, and her face beamed with a new light, and she said: "Ah, yes, it is as I believe, that the good God who still makes the beautiful roses, he will not take him away from me forever."
I never read Oxenham's verse now that I do not see that little cottage in Brittany that has sheltered the same family for centuries; twined about with great red and white roses; and the old mother and the young mother and the little lonely girl.
"Yet our hope in Him reposesWho in war-time still makes roses."
Another time, down on the Toul front lines, I had this thought forced home by a strange scene. It was in mid-March and for three days a heavy blizzard had been blowing. I, who had lived in California for several years, wondered at this blizzard and revelled in it, although I had had to drive amid its fury, sometimes creeping along at a snail's pace, without lights, down near the front lines. It was cruelly cold and hard for those of us who were in the "truck gang."
One night during this blizzard, which blew with such fury as I have never seen before, we were lost. At one time we were headed directly for the German lines, which were close, but an American sentry stopped us before we had gone very far, demanding in stern tones: "Where are youse guys goin' that direction?"
I replied: "To Toul."
"To Toul! You're going straight toward the Boche lines. Turn around. You're the third truck that's got lost in this blizzard. Back that opposite way is your direction."
The morning after it had cleared it was worth all the discomfort to see the hills and fields of France. One group of hills which I had heard were the most heavily fortified in all France, loomed like two huge sentinels before the city. The Germans knew this also, and military experts say that that is the reason why they did not try to reach Paris by this route in the beginning of the war.
We were never permitted on these hills, but we had seen them belch fire many a time as the German airplanes came over the city.
But on this morning, after three days of snow, those great black hills were transformed, covered with a pure white blanket. The trees were robed in white. Not a spot of black appeared. Even the great guns on the top of the hill looked like white fingers pointing toward Berlin. The roads and fields and hills of France had suddenly been transformed as by a magic wand into things beautiful and white.
War is black. War is muddy. War is bloody. War is gray. War is full of hate and hurt and wounds and blood and death and heartache and heartbreak and homesickness and loneliness.
Thomas Tiplady, in "The Cross at the Front," was right when he described war as symbolized by the great black cloud of smoke that unrolled in the sky when a great Jack Johnson had exploded. Everything that war touches it makes ugly, except the soul, and it cannot blacken that.
It ruins the fields and makes them torn and cut; it tears the trees into ragged stumps. It kills the grass and tramples it underfoot. It takes the most beautiful architecture in the world and makes a pile of dust and dirt of it. It takes a beautiful face and makes it horrible with the scars of bayonet and burning gases.
But on this morning God seemed to be covering up all of that ugliness and dirt and mud and blackness. Fields that the day before had been nothing but ugly blotches were white and beautiful. Ammunition dumps, horrible in their suggestion of death, seemed now to have been covered over and hidden by some kindly hand of love. The great brown-bronzed hills, the fortifications filled with death and horror were gleaming white in the morning sunlight.
I said to the other driver: "Well, it's too beautiful to be true, isn't it? It's a shame to think that when we get back from the front it will all be gone, melted, and the old mud and dirt will be back again."
"Yes, but it means something to me," he said.
"What does it mean?"
"It means the future."
"What are you talking about, man?"
"Why, it means that some day this land will be beautiful again. It means that, impossible as that idea seems, the war will cease, that people will till these fields again, that grass will grow, that flowers will bloom in these fields again, that people will come back to their homes in peace. It is symbolical of that great white peace that will come forever, when the ugly thing we call war will be buried so deeply underneath the white blanket of peace and brotherhood that the world will know war no more. It's like a rainbow to me. It is a promise."
I had never heard Tom grow so eloquent before, and what he said sounded Christian. It sounded like man's talk to me. It was the dream of the Christ I knew. It was the dream of the prophets of old. It was Tennyson's dream. Such a dream will not die from the earth, and men will just keep on dreaming it until some day it will come true, for—
"Man proposes—God disposes;Yet my hope in Him reposes,Who in war-time still makes roses."
The white and crimson roses of that little cottage in Brittany, the quiet and peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne d'Arc in the village of Domremy; the blooming of a billion red poppies in the fields of France; the blanketing of the earth with a covering of white snow sufficient to hide the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give promise of the God who, in the end, when he has given man every chance to redeem himself, and who, even amid cruel wars "still makes roses," will finally bring to pass "peace on earth; good-will to men."
"Somewhere in France."
All night long a group of Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. men and women had been feeding the refugees from Amiens. There were two thousand of them in one basement room of the Gare du Nord. They had not eaten for forty-eight hours. Most of them were little children, old men, and women of all ages.
Two hundred or more of them had been in the hands of the Germans for two years, and when a few days before it came time for the Germans to open their second big Somme drive, they had driven these women and little girls out ahead of them, saying: "Go back to the French now, we do not want you any longer."
For two days and nights these refugees had tramped the roads of France without food, many of them carrying little babies in their arms, all of them weary and sick near unto death.
The little children gripped your heart. As you handed them food and saw their little claw-like hands clutch at it, and as you saw them devour it like starved animals, the while clutching at a dirty but much-loved doll, somehow you could not see for the mists in your eyes as you walked up and down the narrow aisles of that crowded basement pouring out chocolate and handing out food. The things you saw every minute in that room hung a veil over your eyes, and you were afraid all the while that in your blinding of tears you would step on some sleeping, starving child, who was lying on the cold floor in utter exhaustion, regardless of food.
One woman especially attracted me. I noticed her time and time again as I walked past her with food. She was lying on her back on the floor, with nothing under her, her arms thrown back over her head, a child in her arms, or rather, lying against her breast asleep. She looked like an educated, cultured woman. Her features were beautiful, but she looked as if she had passed through death and hell in suffering. I asked her several times as I passed by if she wouldn't have some food, and each time she gave some to her baby but took none herself. She could hardly lift her body from the stone basement to feed the child, and feeling that the thing that she needed most herself was food, I urged her to eat, but she would not.
Finally I stopped before her and asked her if she was ill. She looked up into my face and said: "Très fatiguée, monsieur! Très fatiguée, monsieur!" (Very weary, sir! Very weary, sir!)
By morning she was rested and accepted food. Then she told me her story. Two days before in her village they had been ordered by the army to leave their homes in a half-hour; everybody must be gone by that time; the Germans were coming, and there was no time to lose. She had hastily gathered some clothes together. The baby was lying in its crib. Her other child, a little six-year-old girl, had gone out into the front of the home watching for the truck that was to gather up the village people. A bomb fell from a German Gotha and killed this child outright, horribly mangling her body. This suffering mother just had time to pick the little mangled body up and lay it on a bed, kiss its cheeks good-by and leave it there, for there was no other way. She did not even have the satisfaction of burying her child.
"Very weary! Very weary!" I can hear her words yet: "Très fatiguée! Très fatiguée!" No wonder you were fatigued, mother heart. You had a right to be, weary unto death. No wonder you did not care to eat all that long horrible night in the Gare du Nord.
Loneliness is naturally one of the things with which our own boys suffer most. When one remembers that these Americans of ours are thousands of miles away from their homes, most of them boys who have never been away from home in their lives before; most of them boys who have never crossed the ocean before, they will judge fairly and understand better the loneliness of the American soldier. It is not a loneliness that will make him any the less a soldier. Ay, it is because of that very home love, and that very eagerness to get back to his home, that he will and does fight like a veteran to get it over.
"Gosh! I wish I would find just one guy from Redding!" a seventeen-year-old boy said to me one night as I stood in a Y. M. C. A. hut. He was about the loneliest boy I saw in France. I saw that he needed to smile. He was nothing but a kid, after all.
"Gosh! I wish I'd see just one guy from San Jose!" I said with a smile. Then we both laughed and sat down to some chocolate, and had a good talk, the very thing that the lad was hungry for.
He had been in France for nearly a year and he hadn't seen a single person he knew. He had been sick a good deal of the time and had just come from an appendix operation. He was depressed in spirits, and his homesickness had poured itself out in that one phrase: "Gosh! I wish I'd see just one guy from Redding!"
Those who do not think that homesickness comes under the heading of "Suffering" had better look into the face of a truly homesick American boy in France before he judges.
The English Tommy is only a few hours from home, and knows it. The French soldier is fighting on his own native soil, but the American is fighting three thousand miles away from home, and some of them seven thousand.
"I haven't had a letter in five months from home," a boy in a hospital said to me. He was lonely and discouraged. And right here may I say to the American people that there is no one thing that needs more constant urging than the plea that you write, write, write to your soldier in France. He would rather have letters than candy, or cigarettes, or presents of any kind, as much as he loves some of these material things. I have put it to a vote dozens of times, and the result is always the same; ten to one they would rather have a letter from home than a package of cigarettes or a box of candy. I have seen boys literally suffering pangs that were a thousand times worse than wounds because they did not receive letters from those at home.
"Hell! Nobody back there cares a damn about me! I haven't received a letter in five months!" a boy burst out in my presence in Nancy one night.
"Have you no mother or sister?"
"Yes, but they're careless; they always were about letter-writing."
I tried to fix up excuses for them, but it tested both my imagination and my enthusiasm to do it. I could put no real heart into making excuses for them, and so my words fell like lame birds to the ground, and the tragedy of it was that both of us knew there was no good excuse. It was the most pitiable case I saw in France. God pity the careless mother or sister or father or friend who isn't willing to take the time and make the sacrifice that is needed to at least supply a letter three times a week to the lad who is willing to sacrifice his all, if need be, that those at home may live in peace, free from the horror of the Hun.
"Less SweatersAnd More Letters"
might very well be the motto of the folks here at home, for the boys would profit more in the long run, both in their bodies and in their souls. A censor friend of mine said to me one day: "If you ever get a chance when you go home to urge the people of America to write, and write, and write to their boys, do it with all your heart. You could do no better service to the boys than that."
"What makes you feel so keenly about it?" I asked him, for he talked so earnestly that it surprised me. Ordinarily you think of the censor as utterly devoid of humanitarian impulses, just a sort of a machine to slice out the really interesting things in your letters, a great human blue pencil, or a great human pair of scissors. But here was a censor that felt deeply what he was saying.
"I'll tell you," he replied, "it is because some of the letters that I read which are going back home from lonely boys, begging somebody to write to them; literally begging somebody, anybody, to write! It gets my goat! I can't stand it. I often feel like adding a sentence to some letters myself going home, telling them they ought to be ashamed the way they treat their boys about letter-writing; but the rules are so stringent that I must neither add to nor take from a letter save in the line of my duties. I'd like to tell a few of the people back home what I think of them, and I'd like for them to read some of the heartaches that I read in the letters of the boys. Then they'd understand how I feel about it."
I shall never forget my friend the wrestler when I asked how it was that he kept so clean, and he replied: "The letters help a lot."
I have seen boys suffering from wounds of every description. I have seen them lying in hospitals with broken backs. I have seen them with blinded eyes. I have seen them with legs gone, and arms. I have seen them when the doctors were dressing their wounds. I remember one captain who had fifty wounds in his back, and he had them dressed without a single cry. I have seen them gassed, and I have seen them shot to pieces with shell shock, and yet the worst suffering I have seen in France has been on the part of boys whose folks back home have neglected them; boys who, day after day, had seen the other fellows get their letters regularly, boys who had gone with hope in their hearts time after time for letters, and then had lost hope. This is real suffering, suffering that does more to knock the morale out of a lad than anything that I know in France.
Silhouettes of Suffering stand out in my memory with great vividness. One general cause of suffering in addition to the above is loneliness in the heart of the young husband and father, who has a wife and kiddie back home.
I remember one young officer that I saw in a Paris hotel. He had been out in the Vosges Mountains with a company of wood-choppers for six months. He had come in for his first leave. His leave lasted eight days. Instead of going to the theatres he sat around in our officers' hotel lobby and watched the women walking about, the Y. M. C. A. girls who were the hostesses there. They noticed him as he sat there all evening, hardly moving. After several nights one of the men secretaries went up to him and said: "Why don't you go over and talk with them? They would be glad to talk with you."
"Oh," he said, "I never was much for women at home, except my wife and kid. I never did know how to talk to women. Especially now, for I've been up in the woods for six months. Just let me sit here and look at 'em. That's enough for me. Just let me sit here and look at 'em!"
And that was the way he spent his leave, just loafing around in that hotel lobby watching the women at their work.
"This has been the loneliest day of my life," a major said to me on Mother Day in a great port of entry.
"Why, major?"
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the picture of a seven-year-old boy and that boy's mother.
Suffering? Yes, of course I have seen boys wounded, as I have said, but for real downright suffering, loneliness is worst, and it lies entirely within the province of the folks at home to alleviate this suffering. I have seen a boy morose and surly, discouraged and grouchy in the morning. He didn't know what was the matter with himself. In the afternoon I have seen him laughing and yelling like a wild animal at play, happy as a lark.
What was the difference? He had gotten a letter.