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.



VIII

SILHOUETTES OF SORROW

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."



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 reposes Who 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 Americains 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 reposes Who 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."



IX

SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING

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: "Tres fatiguee, monsieur! Tres fatiguee, 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: "Tres fatiguee! Tres fatiguee!" 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 Sweaters And 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.



Then there is the Silhouette of Physical Suffering. Hundreds of these sombre silhouettes stand out against a lurid background of fire and blood. One only I quote because it has a fringe of hope.

The boy's back was broken. It had been broken by a shell concussion. There were no visible signs of a wound on his body anywhere, the doctors told me in the hospital. He did not know it as yet. He thought it was his leg that was hurt. They asked me to tell him, as gently as I could. It was a hard task to give a man.

He was lying on a raised bed so that, when I went up to it, it came up to my neck almost, and when I talked with the lad I could look straight into his eyes. Those eyes I shall never forget, they were so fearless, so brave, and yet so full of weariness and suffering.

I took his hand and said: "Boy, I am a preacher." For once I didn't say anything about being a secretary. I just told him I was a preacher.

He said: "I am so glad you have come. I just wanted to see a real, honest-to-goodness preacher." He forced a smile to accompany this sentence.

"Well, I'm all of that, and proud of it," I replied, smiling back into his brave eyes.

"I'm so tired. I try to be brave, but I've been lying here for three months now, and my leg doesn't seem to get any better. It pains all the time until I think I'll die with the agony of it. I never sleep only when they give me something. But I try hard to be brave."

"You are brave!" I said to him. "They all tell me that, the doctors and nurses."

"They are so good to me." he said in low tones so that I had to bend to hear them. "But my leg; they don't seem to be able to help me."

Then I told him as gently as I could that it was not his leg, that it was his back, and that he would likely not get well. Then I tried to tell him of the room in his Father's house that was ready for him when he was ready to accept it, and of what a glorious welcome there was there.

He reached out for my hand in the semi-darkness of that evening. I can feel his hand-clasp yet. I didn't know what to say, but a phrase that had lingered in my mind from an old story came to the rescue.

"Don't you want the Christ to help you bear your pain?" I asked him.

"That is just what I do want," he said simply. "That was why I was so glad you came—an honest-to-goodness preacher," and he smiled again, so bravely, in spite of his suffering, and in spite of the news that I had just broken to him.

Then we prayed. I stood beside his bed holding his hand and praying. The room was full of other wounded boys, but in the twilight I doubt if a lad there knew what we were doing. I spoke low, just so he could hear, and the Master knew what was in my heart without hearing.

When I was through I felt a pressure of his hand, and he said: "Now I feel stronger. He is helping me bear my burden. Thank you for coming, and"—then he paused for words "and—thank you for bringing Him."

Yes, there is suffering in France, suffering among our soldiers, too, but suffering that is glorified by courage.



X

SOLDIER SILHOUETTES

One night down near the front lines as we drove the great truck slowly over the icy roads, on the top of a little knoll stood a lone sentinel against a background of snow, and that is a silhouette that I shall never forget.

Another night there was a beautiful afterglow, and being a lover of the beautiful as well as a driver of a truck, I was lost in the wonder of the crimson flush against the western hills.

"Makes me homesick," said the big man beside me, whose home is in the West. "Looks for all the world like one of our Arizona afterglows."

"It is beautiful," I replied, and then we were both lost in silent appreciation of the scene before us, when suddenly we were startled witless.

"Halt!" rang out through the semi-darkness. "Who goes there?"

"Y. M. C. A." we shot back as quick as lightning, for we had learned that it doesn't pay to waste time in answering a sentinel's challenge down within sound of the German guns.

"Pass on, friends," was the grinning reply. That rascal of a sentry had caught us unawares, lost in the afterglow, and he was tickled over having startled us into astonishment.

But even though he did give us a scare, I am sure that the picture of him standing there in the middle of that French road, with his gun raised against the afterglow, will be one of the outstanding silhouettes of the memories of France.

Then there was the old Scotch dominie down at Chateau-Thierry, with the marines. The boys called him "Doc," and loved him, for he had been with them for eight months.

One night, in the midst of the hottest fighting in June, the old secretary thought he would go out in the night and see how the boys were getting along. He walked cautiously along the edge of the woods when suddenly the word "Halt!" shot out in low but distinct tones.

"Who goes there?"

"A friend," the secretary replied.

"Oh, it's you, is it, Doc? Gee, I'm glad to see you! This is a darned weird place to-night. Every time the wind blows I think it's a Boche."

There was a slight noise out in No Man's Land. "What's that, Doc, a Boche?"

"I think not."

"You can't tell, Doc; they're everywhere. If I've seen one, I've seen ten thousand to-night on this watch."

That old gray-haired secretary will never forget that night when he walked among the men in the trenches with his little gifts and his word of cheer, that memorable night before the Americans made themselves heroes forever in the Bois du Belleau. He will never forget the sound of that boy sentry's voice when he said, "Gee, Doc, I'm glad it's you"; nor will he forget the looks of the boy as he stood there in the darkness, the guardian of America's hopes and homes, nor will he forget the firm, warm clasp of the lad's hands as he walked away to greet others of his comrades.

These are Soldier Silhouettes that remain vivid until time dies, until the "springs of the seas run dust," as Markham says:

"Forget it not 'til the crowns are crumbled; 'Til the swords of the Kings are rent with rust; Forget it not 'til the hills lie humbled; And the springs of the seas run dust."

No, we do not forget scenes and moments like these in our lives.

Then there is the silhouette of the profile of the captain of a certain American machine-gun company who, in March, marched with his men into the Somme line. He was an old football-player back in the States, and we were having a last dinner together in Paris, a group of college men. After dinner, when we had finished discussing the dangers of the coming weeks, and he had told us that his major had said to him, "If fifteen per cent of us come out alive, I shall be glad," and after we had drifted back to the old college days, and home and babies, and after he had shown us a picture of his wife and his kiddies, it became strangely quiet in the room, and suddenly he turned his face from us, with just the profile showing against the light of the window, and exclaimed: "My God, fellows, for a half-hour you have made me forget that there is a war, and I have been back on the old campus again playing football, and back with my babies."

Then his jaw set, and I shall never forget the profile of his face as that set look came back and once again he became the captain of a machine-gun company.

Then there was the lone church service that my friend Clarke held one evening at a crossroads of France. He had held seven services that Sunday, one in a machine-gun company's dugout, with six men; another with a group of a dozen men in a front-line trench; another with several officers in an officers' dugout; another with a battery outfit who were "On Call," expecting orders to send over a few shells; another with several men out in No Man's Land, on the sunny side of an old upturned mass of tree roots; one in a listening-post, and finally this service with a lone sentry at a crossroads.

"But how did you do it?" I asked.

"I just saw him there," Clarke replied, "and he looked lonely, and I walked up and said: 'How'd you like to have me read a little out of the Book?'

"'Fine!' he said.

"Then I prayed with him, standing there at the crossroads, and I asked him if he didn't want to pray. He was a church boy back home, and he prayed as fine a prayer as ever I heard. Then we sang a hymn together. It was 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul,' and neither of us can sing much, but as I look back on it, it was the sweetest music that I ever had a part in making. The only thing I didn't do was take up a collection. Outside of that, it was just as if we had gone through a regular church service at home. I even preached a little to him. No, not just preached, but talked to him about the Master."

"Did you even go so far with your lone one-man congregation as to have a benediction?" I asked him.

"No, I just said what was in my heart when we were through, 'God bless and keep you, boy,' and went on."

"I never heard a finer benediction than that, old man," I replied with feeling.

And the silhouette of that one Y. M. C. A. secretary holding a religious service with a lone sentry of a Sunday evening, bringing back to the lad's memory sacred things of home and church and the Christ, giving him a new hold on the bigger, better things, bringing the Christ out to him there on that road, that silhouette is mine to keep forever close to my heart. I shall see that and shall smile in my soul over it when eternity calls, and shall thank God for its sweetening influence in my life.

And so this comfort may come to the mothers and fathers of America, that through the various agencies of the American army, through General Pershing's intense interest in righteous things, through that Lincoln-like Christian leader of the chaplains, Bishop Brent, through the Y. M. C. A., and the Salvation Army, and the Knights of Columbus, your boy has his chance, whatever creed, or race, or church, to worship his God as he wishes; and not one misses this opportunity, even the lonely sentinel on the road. And the glorious thing about it is that boys who never before thought of going to church at home, crowd the huts on Sundays and for the good-night prayers on week-days.

Just before the battle of Chateau-Thierry, "Doc," of whom I have spoken in this chapter before, said: "Boys, do you want a communion service?"

"Yes," they shouted.

Knowing that there were Catholics and Jews and Protestants and non-believers there, he said: "Now, anybody who doesn't want to take communion may leave."

Not a single man left. Out of one hundred or more men only two did not kneel to take of the sacred bread and wine. Two Jews knelt with the others, several Roman Catholics, and men of all Protestant denominations. Half of them were dead before another sunrise came around, but they had had their service.

Every man has his opportunity to worship God in his own way and as nearly as possible at his own altars in France. There was the story of "The Rosary."

It was Hospital Hut Number ——, and half a thousand boys from the front, wounded in every conceivable way, were sitting there in the hut in a Sunday-evening service. Many of them had crutches beside them; others canes. Some of them, had their heads bandaged; others of them carried their arms in slings. Some of them had lost legs, and some of them had no arms left. Their eager faces were lighted with a strange light, such as is not seen on land or sea, and on most of those faces, unashamed, ran over pale cheeks the tears of homesickness as the young corporal whom I had taken with me from another town sang "The Rosary." I have never heard it sung with more tenderness, nor have I heard it sung in more beautiful voice. That young lad was singing his heart out to those other boys. He had not been up front himself as yet, for he was in a base port attending to his duties, which were just as important as those up front, but it was hard for him to see it that way. So he loved and respected these other lads who had, to his way of thinking, been more fortunate than he, because they had seen actual fighting. He respected them because of their wounds, and he wanted to help them. So he lifted that rich, sweet, sympathetic tenor voice until the great hut rang with the old, old song, and hearts were melted everywhere. I saw, back in the audience, a group of nurses with bowed heads. They knew what the rosary meant to those who suffer and die in the Catholic faith. They, too, had memories of that beautiful song. A group of officers, including a major, all wounded, listened with heads bowed.

As I sat on the crude stage and saw the effects of his magical voice on this crowd I got to thinking of what this war is meaning to that fine understanding of those who count the beads of the rosary and those who do not. I had seen so many examples of fine fraternal fellowship between Catholic and Protestant that I felt that I ought to put it down in some permanent form.

There is a true story of one of our Y. M. C. A. secretaries who was called to the bedside of a dying Catholic boy. There was no priest available, and the boy wanted a rosary so badly. In his half-delirium he begged for a rosary. This young Protestant Y. M. C. A. secretary started out for a French village, five miles away, on foot, to try to find a rosary for this sick Catholic boy, and after several hours' search he found a peasant woman whom he made understand the emergency of the situation, and he got the loan of the rosary and took it back through five miles of mud to the bedside of that Catholic lad, and comforted him with the feel of it in his fevered hands and the hope of it in his fevered soul. When I heard this story it stirred me to the very fountain depths, but I have seen so much of this fine spirit of service in the Y. M. C. A. since then that I have come to know that as far as the Y. M. C. A. is concerned all barriers of church narrowness are entirely swept away.

I have had most delightful comradeship since I have been in France in one great area as religious director with two Knights of Columbus secretaries and one father—Chaplain Davis—all of whom say freely and eagerly: "We have never had anything but the finest spirit of co-operation and friendship from the Y. M. C. A."

"Why," added Chaplain Davis, a Catholic priest, "why, the first Sunday I was here, when I had no place to take my boys for mass, a secretary came to me and offered me the hut. It has always been that way."

The story of the French priest who confessed a dying Catholic boy through a Y. M. C. A. Protestant secretary interpreter, in a Y. M. C. A. hut, has been told far and wide, but it is only illustrative of the broadening lines of Catholicism and the wider fraternal relations of all professed Christians.

The marvellous story that my friend, the French chaplain, tells of being marooned in a shell-hole at Verdun for several days with a Catholic priest, and of their discussion of religion and life there under shell-fire, and the tenderness with which the Catholic priest kissed the hand of the Protestant French chaplain when the two had agreed that, after all, there was one common God for a common, suffering nation of people, and that this war would break all church barriers down, and that out of it would come a new spirit in the Catholic church, a new brotherhood for all. That was an impressive indication of the thing that is sweeping France to-day in church circles, and that will sweep America after the war.

Then there is that other story of the Catholic priest who had been in the same regiment with a French Protestant chaplain, each of whom deeply respected the other because of the unflinching bravery that each had displayed under intense shell-fire, and of the great love that each had seen the other show in two years of constant warfare in the same regiment. Then came that terrible morning at Verdun, when the French Protestant chaplain, the friend of the Catholic priest, had been killed while trying to bring in a wounded Catholic boy from No Man's Land. On the day of this Protestant chaplain's funeral the Catholic priest stood in God's Acre with bared head, and spoke as tender and as sincere a eulogy as ever a man spoke over the grave of a dear friend, spoke with the tears in his eyes most of the time. Church lines were forgotten here. It was a prophetic scene, this, where a Catholic priest spoke at the funeral of a Protestant chaplain. It was prophetic of that new church brotherhood that is to come after the war is over.



XI

SKY SILHOUETTES

They are the lights, the lights of war. Sometimes they are just the stars shining out that makes the wounded soldier out in No Man's Land look up, in spite of shell-fire and thunder, in spite of wounds and death, in spite of loneliness and heartache, in spite of mud and rain, to exclaim, as Donald Hankey tells us in a most wonderful chapter of "A Student in Arms": "God! God everywhere, and underneath are the everlasting arms!"

Sometimes the Sky Silhouettes number among their own just a moonlight night with a crescent moon sailing quietly and serenely over the horizon in the east, while great guns belch fire in the west, a fire that seems to shame the timid moon itself.

Sometimes they are search-lights cleaving the sky over a great city like Paris, or along the front lines, or gleaming from an air-ship.

Sometimes they are signal-lights flashing out of the darkness from a patrolling plane overhead, or a blazing trail of fire as a patrol falls to its death in a battle by night.

Sometimes they are signal-lights flashing from an observation balloon anchored in the darkness over the trenches to guard the troops from dangers in the air.

Sometimes they are the flashes, the fleet, swallow-like flashes, of an enemy plane caught in the burning, blazing path of a search-light, and then hounded by it to its death.

Sometimes they are signals flashed from the top of a cruiser on the high seas across the storm-tossed waters to a little destroyer, which flashes back its answer, and then in turn flashes a message of light to one of the convoying planes overhead in the dim dusk of early evening.

Sometimes these Sky Silhouettes are the range-finders that poise in the air for a few seconds, guiding the air patrols home, and sometimes they are just the varied, interesting, gleaming, flashing "Lights of War."



XII

THE LIGHTS OF WAR

One's introduction into the war zone and into war-zone cities and villages, and one's visits "down the line" to the front by night, will always be filled with the thrill of the unusual because of the Lights of War. Where lights used to be, there are no lights now, and where they were not seen before the war, they are radiant and rampant now.

The first place that an American traveller notices this absence of lights is on the boat crossing over the Atlantic. From the first night out of New York the boats travel without a single light showing. Every light inside of the boat is covered with a heavy black crape, and the port-holes and windows are so scrupulously and carefully chained down that the average open-air fiend from California or elsewhere feels that he will suffocate before morning comes, and even in the bitterest of winter weather I have known some fresh-air fiends to prefer the deck of the ship, with all of its bitter winds and cold, to the inside of a cabin with no windows open. I stood on the deck of an ocean liner "Somewhere on the Atlantic" a few months ago as the great ship was ploughing its zigzag course through the black waters, dodging submarines. There was not a star in the sky. There was not a light on the boat. Absolutely the only lights that one saw was when he leaned over the railing and saw the splash of innumerable phosphorescent organisms breaking against the boat. I have seen the like of it only once before, and this was on the Pacific down at Asilomar one evening, when the waves were running fire with phosphorescence. It was a beautiful sight there and on the Atlantic too.

IT WAS MIDNIGHT

On this particular night, as far as one could see, this brilliant organic light illuminated the sea like the hands of my luminous wrist-watch were made brilliant by phosphorescence. I noticed this and looked down at my watch to see what time it was. It was midnight.

As I looked, my friend, who was standing beside me on the deck, said: "The last order is that no wrist-watches that are luminous may be exposed on the decks at night. That order came along with the order forbidding smoking on the decks at night. The Germans can sight the light of a cigar a long distance through their periscopes."

I smiled to myself, for it was my first introduction to the romantic part that lights and the lack o' lights is playing in this great World War. Then my friend continued his observations as we stood there on the aft deck watching the white waves break, glorious with phosphorescence. He said: "What a topsyturvy world it is. Three years ago if a great ship like this had dared to cross the Atlantic without a single light showing, it would have horrified the entire world, and that ship captain would have been called to trial by every country that sails the seas. He would have been adjudged insane. But now every ship sails the seas with no navigation-lights showing."

IN WAR COUNTRY

But when one gets his real introduction into the lights o' war is when he gets into the war country. It is eight o'clock in a great French city. This French city has been known the world over for its brilliant lights. It has been known for its gayly lighted boulevards, and indeed this might apply to one of three or four French cities. Light was the one scintillating characteristic of this great city. The first night that one finds himself here he feels as though he were wandering about in a country village at home. No arc-lights shine. The window-lights are all extinguished. The few lights on the great boulevards are so dimmed that their luminosity is about that of a healthy firefly in June back home. One gropes his way about, feeling ahead of him and navigating cautiously, even the main boulevards.

The first time I walked down the streets of this great city at night I had the same feeling that I had on the Atlantic. I was sailing without lights, on an unknown course, and I felt every minute that I would bump into some unseen human craft, as indeed I did, both a feminine craft and a male craft. I also had the feeling that in this particular city, in the darkness I might be submarined by a city human U-boat, which would slip up behind me. After having my second trip here I still have that feeling as I walk the streets; the unlighted streets of this city, and especially the side-streets, by night.

FRENCH CITY DURING RAID

But the one time when you catch the very heart and soul of the lights o' war is when you happen to drop into a French city while the Boches are making a raid overhead. I have had this experience in towns and villages and cities. At the signal of the siren the lights of the entire city suddenly snuff out, and the city or town or village is in total darkness. Candles may be lighted and are lighted, but on the whole one either walks the dark streets flashing his electric "Ever Ready," or huddled up in a subway or in a cellar, or in a hallway listening to the barrage of defense guns and to the bombs dropping, watches and listens and waits in total darkness, and while he waits he isn't certain half the time whether the noise he hears is the dropping of German bombs or the beating of his own heart. Both make entirely too much noise for peace and comfort.

As one approaches the front-line cities and towns he learns something more about the lights o' war. It is dark. He is in a little town and must go to another town nearer the front lines. He is standing at the depot (gare). No lights are visible save here and there an absolutely necessary red or green light, which is veiled dimly. His train pulls silently in. There is not a single light on it from one end to the other. It creeps in like a great snake. There is nobody to tell you whether this is your train or not, but you take a chance and climb into a compartment which is pitch-dark.

HEARS AMERICAN VOICE

You have a ticket that calls for first-class military compartment, but you climbed into the first open door you saw, and didn't know and didn't care whether it was first, second, third, or tenth class just so you got on your way. Your eyes soon became accustomed to the darkness and you discerned two or three forms in the seat opposite you. You wondered if they were French, Italians, Belgians, English, Australians, Canadians, Moroccans, Algerians, or Americans. It was too dark to see, but suddenly you heard a familiar voice saying, "Gosh, I wish I was back in little ole New York," and you made a grab in the darkness for that lad's hand.

All during your trip no trainman appears. You are left to your own sweet will at nights in the war zone when you are on a train. No stations are announced. You are supposed to have sense enough to know where you are going, and to have gumption enough to get off without either being assisted or told to do so. The assumption, I suppose, is that anybody who travels in the war zone knows where he is going. Personally, I felt like the American phrase, "I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way," and I tried to jump off at two or three towns before I got to my own destination, but the American soldiers had been that way before on their way to the trenches, and wouldn't let me off at the wrong place. I thought surely that somebody would come along to take my ticket, but nobody appeared. I soon found that night trains "on the line" pay little attention to such minor matters as tickets, and I have a pocketful that have never been taken up. Time after time I have piled into a train at night, after buying a ticket to my destination; have journeyed to my destination, have gone through the depot and to my hotel without ever seeing a trainman to take the ticket. I was let severely alone. And even if a conductor had come along through the train it would have been too dark for him to have seen me, and I am sure I could have dodged him had I so desired. Maybe that's the reason they don't take the tickets up. Anyhow, I have given you a picture of a great train in the war zone, winding its way toward the front, in complete darkness.

FLASH-LIGHTS

Flash-lights have come into their own in this war. One would as soon think of living without a flash-light as he would think of travelling without clothes in Greenland. It simply cannot be done. In any city, from Paris to the smallest towns on the front, one must have his flash-light. The streets of the cities and towns of France are a hundred times more crooked than those of Boston. If Boston's streets followed the cow-paths, the streets of the cities of France followed cows with the St. Vitus dance. Around these streets one had to find his way by night with a flash-light, especially during an air-raid. One must have a flash, too, for the houses and hotels when an air-raid is on, and one must have it when one is driving a big truck or an automobile down along the front lines, for no lights are permitted on any machines, official or otherwise, after a certain point is reached. One of the favorite outdoor sports of this preacher for a month was to lie on his stomach on the front mud-guard of a big Pierce-Arrow through the war-zone roads, bumping over shell-holes, with a little pocket flash-light playing on the ground, searching out the shell-holes, and trying to help the driver keep in the road. It is a delightful occupation about two o'clock in the morning, with a blizzard blowing, and knowing that the big truck is rumbling along within sight and sound of the German big guns. Trucks make more noise on such occasions than a Twentieth Century Limited. "No lights beyond divisional headquarters" was the order, and night after night we travelled along these roads with only an occasional flash of the Ever Ready to guide. And so it is that the flash-light has come to its own, and every private soldier, officer, and citizen in France is equipped with one. He would be like a swordfish without its sword if he didn't have it.

LADDER OF LIGHT

Then suddenly you see a strange finger of light reaching into the sky. Or you may liken it to a ladder of light climbing the sky. Or you may liken it to a lance of light piercing the darkness. Or you may just call it a good, old-fashioned search-light, which it is. It is watching for Hun planes, and it plays all night long from north to south, from east to west, restlessly, eagerly, quickly, like a "hound of the heavens" guarding the earth. First it sweeps the horizon, and then it suddenly shoots straight up into the zenith like another sun, and it seems to flood the very skies. No German plane can cut through that path of light without being seen, and one night I had the rare privilege of seeing a plane caught by the search-light on its ever-vigilant patrol. It was a thrilling sight. One minute later the anti-aircraft guns were thundering away and the shrapnel was breaking in tiny patches around this plane while the search-lights played on both the plane and the shrapnel patches of smoke against the sky, making a wonderful picture. Military writers say that the enemy planes are more afraid of these search-lights than of the guns.



But perhaps the most thrilling sight of all is that dark night when one sees for the first time the star-shells along the horizon. At first you may see them ten miles away making luminous the earth. Then as you drive nearer and nearer, that far-off heat-lightning effect disappears and you can actually see the curve of the star-shells as they mount toward the skies over No Man's Land and fall again as gracefully as a fountain of water. Sometimes you will see them for miles along the front, making night day and lighting up the fields and surrounding hills as though for a great celebration.

BURSTING BOMBS

The light of bursting shells as they fall, or of bursting bombs from an aeroplane, is a short, sharp, quick light like an electric flash when a wire falls or a flash of sharp lightning, but the light of the great guns along the line as they thunder their missiles of death can be seen for miles when a bombardment is on. One forgets the thunder of these belching monsters, and one forgets the death they carry, in the glory of the flame of noonday light that they make in the night.

Then there are the range-finders. These suddenly shoot up in the night, steady and clear, and remain for several minutes burning brightly before they go out. I used to see these frequently driving home from the front. They were sent up from the hangars to guide the French and American planes to a safe landing by night.

Then there is the moonlight. Moonlight nights in towns along the war front are dreaded, for it invariably means a Boche raid. Clear moonlight nights with a full moon are fine for lovers in a country that is at peace, but it may mean death for lovers in a country that is at war. But moonlight nights are beautiful even in war countries, with dim old cathedrals looming in the background, and the white villages of France, a huge chateau here and there against the hillside or crowning its summit; and the white roads and white fields of France swinging by. One forgets there is war then, until he hears the unmistakable beat of the Hun plane overhead and sees the flash of one, two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fifteen bombs break in a single field a few hundred yards away, and the driver remarks: "I knew we'd have a raid tonight. It's a great night for the Boche!"

STARLIGHT AT FRONT

Then there is the starlight on No Man's Land, for the starlight is a part of the lights o' war just as are the moonlight and the star-shells and the little flash-lights and the range-finders and the bursting shells and bombs. But there are other more significant lights o' war.

There is the "Light that Lies in the Soldiers' Eyes," of which my friend Lynn Harold Hough has written so beautifully and understandingly. Only over here it is a different light. It is the light of a great loneliness for home, hidden back of a light that we see in the eyes of the three soldiers in the painting "The Spirit of Seventy-Six." It is there. It is here. One sees it in the eyes of the lads who have come in out of the trenches after they have had their baptism of fire. I have seen them come in after successfully repulsing a German raid and I have seen their eyes fairly luminous with victory, and that light says, as said the spirit of France, not only "They shall not pass," but it says something else. It says: "We'll go get 'em! We'll go get 'em!" That's the light o' war that lies in the soldiers' eyes back of the light of home. I verily believe that the two are close akin. The American lad knows that the sooner we lick the Hun the sooner he'll get back home, where he wants to be more than he wants anything else on earth.

Y. M. C. A.'s LIGHT

Then there's the light in the Y. M. C. A. hut, and from General Pershing down to the lowest private the army knows that this is the warmest, friendliest, most home-like, most welcome light that shines out through the darkness of war. It not only shines literally by night, but it shines by day. I have seen some huts back of the front lines lighted by the most brilliant electricity. Some of it is obtained from local power-plants, and some of it is made by the Y. M. C. A. Then I have seen some huts up near the lines that were lighted by old-fashioned oil-lamps. Then I have been in Y. M. C. A. dugouts and cellars and holes in the ground, up so close to the German lines that they were shelled every day, and these have been lighted by tallow candles stuck in a bottle or in their own melted grease. I have seen huts back of the lines away from danger of air-raids that could have their windows wide open, and I have seen the light pouring in a flood out of these windows, a constant invitation to thousands of American boys. And again I have seen our huts in places so near the lines that the secretaries had not only to use candles but to screen their windows with a double layer of black cloth, so that not a single ray of that tiny candle might throw its beams to the watching German on the hill beyond. I never knew before what Shakespeare meant when he said: "How far a tiny candle throws its beams." But whether it has been in the more protected huts back of the lines or in the dangerous huts close to the lines, the lights in the huts are usually the only lights available for the boys, and to these lights they flock every night. It is a Rembrandt picture that they make in the dim light of the candles sitting around the tables writing letters by candle-light. It is their one warm, bright spot, for a great stove nearly always blazes away in the Y. M. C. A. hut, and it is the only warmth the lad knows. Few of the billets or tents in France boast of a stove.

Two things I shall never forget. One was the sight of a Y. M. C. A. hut that I saw in a town far back of the trenches. It was in the town where General Pershing's headquarters are located. On the very tip of the hill above me was the hut. Its every window was a blaze of light. It was the one dominating, scintillating building of the town, a big double hut. When I climbed the hill to this hut I found it crowded to its limits with men from everywhere. The rest of the town was dark and there was little life, but here was the pulse of social life and comradeship, and here was the one blaze and glory of light.

The other sight that I shall not forget was up within a few hundred yards of the German lines. It was night. We were returning from our furtherest hut "down the line." We met a crowd of American soldiers tramping through the snow and mud and cold. They were shivering even as they walked. We stopped the machine and gave them a lift. I asked one of the lads where he was going. He said: "Down to the 'Y' hut in ——." I said: "Where is your camp?" He replied: "Up at ——." I said: "Why, boy, that's four miles away from the hut." "We don't care. We walk it every night. It's the only warm place in reach and the only place where we can be where there are lights at night and where we can get to see the fellows and write a letter. We stay there for an hour or two and tramp back through this —— (censored) mud to our billets."

And of all the lights o' war one must know that the lights of the Y. M. C. A. huts cast their beams not only into the hearts of these lads but across the world, and sometimes I think across the eternities, for in these huts innumerable lads are seeing the light that never was on land or sea, and are finding the light that lights the way to Home. And these are the lights o' war.



XIII

SILHOUETTES OF SUNSHINE

There is laughter and song and sunshine among our boys in France. Let every mother and father be sure of that. Your boys are always lonely for home and for you, but they are not depressed, and they are there to stay until the job is done. There are times of unutterable loneliness, but usually they are a buoyant, happy, human crowd of American boys.

Those of us who have lived with them, slept with them, eaten with them, come back with no sense of gloom or depression. I say to you that the most buoyant, happy, hopeful, confident crowd of men in the wide world is the American army in France. If you could see them back of the lines, even within sound of the guns, playing a game of ball; if you could see them putting on a minstrel show in a Y. M. C. A. hotel in Paris; if you could see a team of white boys playing a team of negro boys; if you could see a whole regiment go in swimming; if you could see them in a track meet, you would know that, in spite of war, they are living normal lives, with just about the same proportion of sunshine and sorrow as they find at home, with the sunshine dominant.

Some Silhouettes of Sunshine gleam against the background of war like scintillating diamonds and

"Send a thrill of laughter through the framework of your heart; And warm your inner being 'til the tear drops want to start."

There was that watch-trading incident on the Toul line.

The Americans had only been there a week, but it hadn't taken them long to get acquainted with the French soldiers. About all the two watch-trading Americans knew of French was "Oui! Oui!" and they used this every minute.

The American soldiers had a four-dollar Ingersoll watch, and this illuminated time-piece had caught the eye of the French soldier. He, in turn, had an expensive, jewelled, Swiss-movement pocket-watch. The American knew its value and wanted it.

They stood and argued. Several times during the interesting transaction the American shrugged his shoulders and walked away as if to say: "Oh, I don't want your old watch. It isn't worth anything."

Then they would get together again, and the gesticulating would begin all over; the machine-gun staccato of "Oui Oui's" would rattle again, and the argument would continue, without either one of the contracting parties knowing a word of the other's language.

At last I saw the American soldier unstrap his Ingersoll and hand it over to the Frenchman, who, in turn, pulled out the good Swiss-movement watch, and both parties to the transaction went off happy, for each had gotten what he wanted.

One of the funniest things that happened in France while I was there was told me by a wounded boy one Sunday afternoon back of the Notre Dame cathedral. He was invalided from the Chateau-Thierry scrap in which the American marines had played such a heroic part. He was a member of the marines, and was slightly wounded. He saw that I was a secretary, and thought to play a good joke on me. He pulled out of his breast-pocket a small black thing that looked and was bound just like a Bible. Its corner was dented, and it was plain to be seen that a bullet had hit it, and that that book had stopped its death-dealing course.

I should have been warned by a gleam that I saw in his eyes, but was not. I said: "So you see that it's a good thing to be carrying a Bible around in your pocket?"

"Yes, that saved my life last week," he said impressively. Then he showed me the hole in his blouse where it had hit. The hole was still torn and ragged. In the meantime I was opening what I thought was his Bible.

It was a deck of cards.

I can hear that fine American lad's laughter yet. It rang like the bells of the old cathedral itself, in the shadow of which we stood. His laughter startled the group of old men playing checkers on a park bench into forgetting their game and joining in the fun. Everybody stopped to see what the fun was about. That lad had a good one on the secretary, and he was enjoying it as much as the secretary himself.

Then he said: "Now I'll tell you a good story to make up for fooling you."

"You had better," I said with a sheepish grin.

Then he began:

"There was a fellow named Rosenbaum brought in with me last week to the Paris hospital, wounded in three places. They put me beside him and he told me his story.

"It was at Belleau Wood and the Americans were plunging through to the other side driving the Boche before them. This Jewish boy is from New York City, and one of the favorites of the whole marine outfit. He had gotten separated from his friends. Suddenly he was confronted by a German captain with a belching automatic revolver. The Hun got him in the shoulder with the first shot. Then the American made a lunge with his bayonet, and ran the captain through the neck, but not before the captain shot him twice through the left leg. The two fell together. When the boy from New York came to consciousness he reached out and there was the dead German officer lying beside him.

"The boy took off the captain's helmet first, and pulled it over to himself. Then he took his revolver and his cartridge-belt and piled them all in a little pile. Then he took off his shoes and his trousers and every stitch of clothes that the officer had on, and painfully strapped them around himself under his own blouse. After he had done this he strapped the officer's belt on himself. When the stretcher-bearers got to him and had taken him to a first-aid and the nurses took his clothes off, they found the officer's outfit.

"'Say, boy, are you a walking pawnshop?' the good-natured doctor said, and proceeded to take the souvenirs away.

"This was the military procedure, but the New York boy cried and said: 'I'll die on your hands if you take them away.'

"He was a serious case, and so they humored him and let him keep his souvenirs, and when I saw them take him out to a base hospital this morning, he still had them strapped to him, with a grin on his face like a darky eating watermelon."

"What did you say his name was?" I asked.

"Rosenbaum," the boy replied. "Rosenbaum from New York."

"Say, if they'd only recruit a regiment like that from America, we'd send the whole German army back to Berlin naked," added another soldier who was standing near.

Then we all had another good laugh, which in its turn disturbed the old men playing checkers on the bench under the trees back of Notre Dame. But the soldier who told me the story added thoughtfully a truth that every one in France knows.

"At that, I'm tellin' you, boy, there aren't any braver soldiers in the American army than them Jewish boys from New York. I got 'o hand it to them."

"Yes, we all do," I replied.

This good-natured raillery goes on all over the army, for it is a cosmopolitan crowd, such as never before wore the uniform of the United States, and each group, the negro group, the Italian group, the Jewish group, the Slav group, the Western group, the Southern group, the Eastern group, all have their little fun at the expense of the others, and out of it all comes much sunshine and laughter, and no bitterness.

The Jewish boy loves to repeat a good joke on his own kind as well as the others. I myself saw the letter that a Jewish boy was writing to his uncle in New York, eulogizing the Y. M. C. A. He was not an educated lad, but he was a wonderfully sincere boy, and he pleaded his cause well. He had been treated so well by the "Y" that he wanted his uncle to give all his spare cash to that great organization. This is the letter:

"DEAR UNCLE:

"This here Y. M. C. A. is the goods. They give you chocolate when you're goin' into the trenches and they gives you chocolate when you're comin' out and they don't charge you nothin' for it neither. If you are givin' any money don't you give it to none of them Red Crosses nor to none of them Salvation Armies, nor to none of them Knights of Columbuses; but you give it to them Y. M. C. A.'s. They treat you right. They have entertainments for you and wrestlin' matches, and they give you a place to write. And what's more, Uncle they don't have no respect fer no religion.

"Yours,

"BILL."

Yes, France is full of Silhouettes of Sunshine. There was the eloquent Y. M. C. A. secretary. And while he didn't exactly know it, he too was adding his unconscious ray of light to a dull and desolate world.

The Gothas had come over Paris the night before, and so had a group of some one hundred and fifty new secretaries. The Gothas had played havoc with two blocks of buildings on a certain Paris street because of the fact that the bombs they dropped had severed the gas-mains. The result did have a look of desolation I'll have to admit. So far the new secretaries had done no damage.