Chapter 2

Another Silhouette of the Sea! Troops are expected in at a certain port of entry. The camp has been emptied of ten thousand men. That means but one thing, that new troops are expected. The great dirigibles sailed out a few hours ago. The sea-planes followed. Thousands of American men and women lined the docks waiting, peering with anxious eyes out toward the "point." Here at this point a great cape jutted out into the ocean, and around this cape we were accustomed to catch sight of the convoys first.

A sense of great expectancy was upon us. We had heard rumors of submarines off the shore for several days. Then suddenly we heard a terrific cannonading, and we knew that the transports and the convoys were in a battle with the U-boats that had lain in wait for them. An anxious hour passed. The sun was setting and the west was a great rose blanket.

Then a shout went up far down the line of waiting Americans as the first great transport swung around the cape. Then another, and a third and a fourth, and finally a fifth; great gray bulks, two of them camouflaged until you could not tell whether they were little destroyers or a group of destroyers on one big ship. Then they got near enough to see the American boys, thousands of them, lining the railings. Through the glasses we could make out the names of the transports. They were some of the largest that sail the Atlantic. When as they came slowly in on the full tide, with that rose sunset back of them, the bands on their decks playing across the waters, and five thousand boys on the first boat singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning," then the "Marseillaise," and finally "The Star-Spangled Banner," in which the crowd on the shore joined, there was a Silhouette of the Sea that burned its way into our souls.

There were the great ships, and beyond them the cape, and beyond that the hovering dirigibles, and beyond them the great bird seaplanes, and beyond them the background of a rose-colored sky, and beyond that the memories of home.

III

SILHOUETTES OF SACRIFICE

Every day for two months, February and March, sometimes when the roads were hub-deep with mud, and sometimes when the roads were a glare of ice and snow and driving the big truck was dangerous work, we passed the crucifix.

It was the guide-post where four roads forked. One road went up to the old monastery, where we had, in one corner, a canteen. Another road led down toward divisional headquarters. Another road led into Toul, and a fourth led directly toward the German lines, over which, if we had driven far enough, as we started to do one night in the dark, we could have gone straight to Berlin.

The first night that I went "down the line" alone with a truck-load I was trembling inside about directions. The divisional man said: "Go straight out the east gate of the city, down the road until you come to the cross at the forks of the road. Take the turn to the left."

But even with these directions I was not certain. I was frankly afraid, for I knew that a wrong turn would take me into German lines. I did not like that prospect at all.

I drove the big car cautiously through the night. There were no lights, and at best it was not easy driving. This night was impenetrably dark. When I came to the cross-roads I stopped the machine and climbed down. I wanted to make sure of the directions, and they were printed in French on the sign-board that was near the crucifix about which he had told me.

I got my directions all right, and then, moved by curiosity, flashed my pocket-light on the figure of the bronze Christ on the crucifix there at the crossroads guide-post. There was an inscription. Laboriously finding each small letter with my flash in the darkness, my engine panting off to the side of the road, I spelled it all out:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

Off in the near distance the star-shells were lighting up No Man's Land. "Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?" they seemed to say to me.

I climbed into the machine and started on.

Suddenly I heard the purring of Boche planes overhead. One gets so that he can distinguish the difference between French planes and Boche planes. These were Boche planes, and they were bent on mischief. Then the search-lights began to play in the sky over me. But they were too late, for hardly had I started on my way when "Boom! boom! boom! boom!" one after another, ten bombs were dropped, and as each dropped it lighted up the surrounding country like a great city in flames.

As I saw this awful desecration of the land the phrase of the cross seemed to sing in unison with the beating of the engine of my truck:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

Suddenly out of the night crept an ambulance train, which passed my slower and larger machine. They had no time to wait for me. They were American boys on their errands of mercy, and the front was calling them. I knew that something must be going on off toward the front lines, for the rumbling of the big guns had been going on for an hour. As these ambulances passed me--more than twenty-five of them passed as silent ships pass in the night--that phrase kept singing: "Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

Then I drove a bit farther on my way, and off across a field I saw the walls of a great hospital. It was an evacuation hospital, and I had visited in its wards many times after a raid, when hundreds of our boys had been brought in every night and day, with four shifts of doctors kept busy day and night in the operating-room caring for them. As I thought of all that I had seen in that hospital, again that singing phrase of the crucifix at the crossroads was on my lips: "Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

A mile farther, and just a few feet from the road, I passed a little "God's acre" that I knew so well. As its full meaning swept over me there in the darkness of that night, the heartache and loneliness of the folks at home whose American boys were lying there, some two hundred of them, the old crucifix phrase expressed it all:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And, somehow, as I drove back by the crucifix in the darkness of the next morning, about two o'clock, I had to stop again and with my flash-light spell out the lettering on the cross.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that this was France speaking to America:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And when I paused in the darkness of that night and thought of the one million and a quarter of the best manhood of France who had given their lives for the precious things that we hold most dear: our homes, our children, our liberty, our democracy; and when I thought that France had saved that for us; and when I remembered the funeral processions that I had seen every day since I had been in France, and when I remembered the women doing the work of men, handling the baggage of France, ploughing the fields of France; doing the work of men because the men were all either killed or at the front; when I remembered the little fatherless children that I had seen all over France, whose sad eyes looked up into mine everywhere I went; and when I remembered the young widows (every woman of France seems to be in black); and when I remembered the thousands of blind men and boys that I had seen being led helplessly about the streets of the cities and villages of France; and when I remembered that lonely wife that one Sunday afternoon in Toul I had watched go and kneel beside a little mound and place flowers there--the dates on the stone of which I later saw were "March, 1916," then I cried aloud in the darkness as I realized the tremendous sacrifice that France has made for the world, as well as England and Belgium. "No, France! No, England! No, little Belgium! this traveller has never seen so great a grief as thine!"

"No, mothers and fathers, little children, wives, brothers, sisters of France, and England, and Belgium, this traveller, America, has never seen so great a grief as thine!"

And later I learned, after living in the Toul sector for two months, that the challenging sentence on the crucifix had been read by nearly every boy who had passed it; and all had. Either he had read it himself or it had been quoted to him, and this one crucifix question had much to do with challenging the boys who passed it to a new understanding of all that France had passed through in the war.

The American boys have learned to respect the French soldier because of the sacrifice that he has made. The American soldier remembers that crowd of men called "Kitchener's Mob," which Kitchener sent into the trenches of France to stem the tide of inhumanity, and to whom he gave a message: "Go! Sacrifice yourselves while I raise an army in England!" The American soldier knows all of this. He knows that little Belgium might have said to all the world, "The forces were too great for us," and she could have stepped aside and the world would have forgiven her.

But instead she chose deliberately to sacrifice herself for the cause of freedom, and sacrifice herself she did. And that sentence on the crossroads crucifix in the Toul sector, day after day, sends its reminder into the heart of the American soldiers, who stop their trucks and their ammunition wagons, pause their weary marches to read it; sends its reminder of the sacrifices that our allies have already made, and the sacrifices that we may be called upon to make. "Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And the American officer and soldier must admit that he has not; and he prays God silently in the night as he rides by on his horse, or as he drives by on his motor-truck, or as he flashes by on his motor-cycle, though they may be willing to suffer as France has suffered, if need be, prays God that that may never be necessary, for the American soldier, since he has been in France, has seen what suffering means.

And so that crossroads crucifix stands out against the lurid night of France, with its reminder constantly before the American soldier, and it tends to make him more gentle with French children and women, and more kindly with French men. There is a new understanding of each other, a new cement of friendship binding our allies together in France; there is a new world-wide brotherhood breaking across the horizon of time, coming through sacrifice.

The world is once again being atoned for. Its sin is being washed away. Innocent men are suffering that humanity may be saved.

The last time I saw this cross was by night. I had seen it first at night, and fitting it was that I should see it last at night. There was a terrible bombardment down the lines. Hundreds of American boys had been killed. One was wounded who was a son of one of the foremost Americans. News of the fight had been coming in to us all day long. Night came and "runners" were still bringing in the gruesome details. The ambulances were running in a continuous procession. We had seen things that day and night that made our hearts sick. We had seen American boys white and unconscious. We had seen every available room in the great evacuation hospital crowded. We had been told that a hundred surgical cases were in the hospital, mostly shrapnel wounds, and that every available doctor and nurse was working night and day.

We had seen, under one snow-covered canvas, six boys who had been killed by one shell early that morning--boys that the night before we had talked with down in a front-line hut--boys who had been killed in their billet in one room. We had seen a captain come staggering into our hut wet to the skin, soaked with blood, his hair dishevelled, his face haggard. He had been fighting since three o'clock that morning. He had been shell-shocked, and had been sent into the hospital.

"My God!" he cried, "I saw every officer in my company killed. First it was my first lieutenant. They got him in the head. Then about ten o'clock I saw my second lieutenant fall. Then early in the afternoon my top-sergeant got a bayonet, and a hand-grenade got a group of my non-commissioned officers. Half of my boys are gone."

Then he sat down and we got him some hot chocolate. This seemed to revive his spirits, and he said: "But, thank God, we licked them! We licked them at their own game! We got them six to one, and drove them back! No Man's Land is thick with their beastly bodies. They are hanging on the wires out there like trapped rabbits!"

Then the thoughts of his own officers came back.

"My God! Now we know what war means. We've been playing at war up to this time. Now we've got to suffer! Then we'll know what it all means." He was half-delirious, we could see, and sent for an ambulance.

As I drove home that night I passed the crossroads crucifix. This time I needed no lights to guide me. The whole horizon was alight with bursting shells and Very lights. Long before I got to it I could see the gaunt form of the cross reaching its black but comforting arms up against the background of lurid light along the front where I knew that American men were dying for me. The picture of that wayside cross, looming against the lurid light of battle, shall never die in my memory.

It was the silhouette of France and America suffering together, a silhouette standing out against a livid horizon of fire.

I needed no tiny pocket search-light to read the words on the cross. They had already burned their way into my heart and into the hearts of that whole division of American soldiers, that division which has since so distinguished itself at Belleau Woods! But now America has a new understanding of the meaning of that sentence, for America, too, is suffering, and she is sacrificing.

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

"Yes, France; we understand now."

IV

SILHOUETTES SPIRITUAL

It was the gas ward. I had held a vesper service that evening and had had a strange experience. Just before the service I had been introduced to a lad who said to the chaplain who introduced me that he was a member of my denomination.

The boy could not speak above a whisper. He was gassed horribly, and in addition to his lungs being burned out and his throat, his face and neck were scarred.

"I have as many scars on my lungs as I have on my face," he said quite simply. I had to bend close to hear him. He could not talk loud enough to have awakened a sleeping child.

He said to me: "I used to be leader of the choir at home. At college I was in the glee-club, and whenever we had any singin' at the fraternity house they always expected me to lead it. Since I came into the army the boys in my outfit have depended upon me for all the music. In camp back home I led the singing. Even the Y. M. C. A. always counted on me to lead the singing in the religious meetings. Many's the time I have cheered the boys comin' over on the transport and in camp by singin' when they were blue. But I can't sing any more. Sometimes I get pretty blue over that. But I'll be at your meeting this evening, anyway, and I'll be right down on the front seat as near the piano as I can get. Watch for me."

And sure enough that night, when the vesper service started, he was right there. I smiled at him and he smiled back.

I announced the first hymn. The crowd started to sing. Suddenly I looked toward him. We were singing "Softly Now the Light of Day Fades Upon My Sight Away." His book was up, his lips were moving, but no sound was coming. That sight nearly broke my heart. To see that boy, whose whole passion in the past had been to sing, whose voice the cruel gas had burned out, started emotions throbbing in me that blurred my eyes. I couldn't sing another note myself. My voice was choked at the sight. A lump came every time I looked at him there with that book up in front of him, a lump that I could not get out of my throat. I dared not look in his direction.

After the service was over I went up to him. I knew that he needed a bit of laughter now. I knew that I did, too. So I said to him: "Lad, I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't helped us out on the singing this evening."

He looked at me with infinite pathos and sorrow in his eyes. Then a look of triumph came into them, and he looked up and whispered through his rasped voice: "I may not be able to make much noise any more, and I may never be able to lead the choir again, but I'll always have singing in my soul, sir! I'll always have singing in my soul!"

And so it is with the whole American army in France--it always has singing in its soul, and courage, and manliness, and daring, and hope. That kind of an army can never be defeated. And no army in the world, and no power, can stand long before that kind of an army.

That kind of an army doesn't have to be sent into battle with a barrage of shells in front of it and a barrage of shells back of it to force it in, as the Germans have been doing during the last big offensive, according to stories that boys at Château-Thierry have been telling me. The kind of an army that, in spite of wounds and gas, "still has singing in its soul" will conquer all hell on earth before it gets through.

Then there is the memory of the boys in the shell-shock ward at this same hospital. I had a long visit with them. They were not permitted to come to the vesper service for fear something would happen to upset their nerves. But they made a special request that I come to visit them in their ward. After the service I went. I reached their ward about nine, and they arose to greet me. The nurse told me that they were more at ease on their feet than lying down, and so for two hours we stood and talked on our feet.

"How did you get yours?" I asked a little black-eyed New Yorker.

"I was in a front-line trench with my 'outfit,' down near Amiens," he said. "We were having a pretty warm scrap. I was firing a machine-gun so fast that it was red-hot. I was afraid it would melt down, and I would be up against it. They were coming over in droves, and we were mowing them down so fast that out in front of our company they looked like stacks of hay, the dead Germans piled up everywhere. I was so busy firing my gun, and watching it so carefully because it was so hot, that I didn't hear the shell that suddenly burst behind me. If I had heard it coming it would never have shocked me."

"If you hear them coming you're all right?" I asked.

"Yes. It's the ones that surprise you that give you shell-shock. If you hear the whine you're ready for them; but if your mind is on something else, as mine was that day, and the thing bursts close, it either kills you or gives you shell-shock, so it gets you both going and coming." He laughed at this.

"I was all right for a while after the thing fell, for I was unconscious for a half-hour. When I came to I began to shake, and I've been shaking ever since."

"How did you get yours?" I asked another lad, from Kansas, for I saw at once that it eased them to talk about it.

"I was in a trench when a big Jack Johnson burst right behind me. It killed six of the boys, all my friends, and buried me under the dirt that fell from the parapet back of me. I had sense and strength enough to dig myself out. When I got out I was kind of dazed. The captain told me to go back to the rear. I started back through the communication-trench and got lost. The next thing I knew I was wandering around in the darkness shakin' like a leaf."

Then there was the California boy. I had known him before. It was he who almost gave me a case of shell-shock. The last time I saw him he was standing on a platform addressing a crowd of young church people in California. And there he was, his six foot three shaking from head to foot like an old man with palsy, and stuttering every word he spoke. He had been sent to the hospital at Amiens with a case of acute appendicitis. The first night he was in the hospital the Germans bombed it and destroyed it. They took him out and put him on a train for Paris. This train had only gotten a few miles out of Amiens when the Germans shelled it and destroyed two cars.

"After that I began to shake," he said simply.

"No wonder, man; who wouldn't shake after that?" I said. Then I asked him if he had had his operation yet.

"It can't be done until I quit shaking."

"When will you quit?" I asked, with a smile.

"Oh, we're all getting better, much better; we'll be out of here in a few months; they all get better; 90 per cent of us get back in the trenches."

And that is the silver lining to this Silhouette Spiritual. The doctors say that a very large percentage of them get back.

"We call ourselves the 'First American Shock Troops,'" my friend from the West said with a grin.

"I guess you are 'shock troops,' all right. I know one thing, and that is that you would give your folks back home a good shock if they saw you."

Then we all laughed. Laughter was in the air. I have never met anywhere in France such a happy, hopeful, cheerful crowd as that bunch of shell-shocked boys. It was contagious. I went there to cheer them up, and I got cheered up. I went there to give them strength, and came away stronger than when I went in. It would cheer the hearts of all Americans to take a peep into that room; if they could see the souls back of the trembling bodies; if they could get beyond the first shock of those trembling bodies and stuttering tongues. And, after all, that is what America must learn to do, to get beyond, and to see beyond, the wounds, into the soul of the boy; to see beyond the blinded eyes, the scarred faces, the legless and armless lads, into the glory of their new-born souls, for no boy goes through the hell of fire and suffering and wounds that he does not come out new-born. The old man is gone from him, and a new man is born in him. That is the great eternal compensation of war and suffering.

I have seen boys come out of battles made new men. I have seen them go into the line sixteen-year-old lads, and come out of the trenches men. I saw a lad who had gone through the fighting in Belleau Woods. I talked with him in the hospital at Paris. His face was terribly wounded. He was ugly to look at, but when I talked with him I found a soul as white as a lily and as courageous as granite.

"I may look awful," he said, "but I'm a new man inside. What I saw out there in the woods made me different, somehow. I saw a friend stand by his machine-gun, with a whole platoon of Germans sweeping down on him, and he never flinched. He fired that old gun until every bullet was gone and his gun was red-hot. I was lying in the grass where I could see it all. I saw them bayonet him. He fought to the last against fifty men, but, thank God, he died a man; he died an American. I lay there and cried to see them kill him, but every time I think of that fellow it makes me want to be more of a man. When I get back home I'm going to give up my life to some kind of Christian service. I'm going to do it because I saw that man die so bravely. If he can die like that, in spite of my face I can live like a man."

The boys in the trenches live a year in a month, a month in a week, a week in a day, a day in an hour, and sometimes an eternity in a second. No wonder it makes men of them overnight. No wonder they come out of it all with that "high look" that John Oxenham writes about. They have been reborn.

Another wounded boy who had gone through the fighting back of Montdidier said to me in the hospital: