“ The sigh of the waves along Hebridean shores called to me there, among the graves in France.
The men who lie in this hospital are those who could not be carried further meanwhile, and they have been dropped here, in passing, to hover between life and death until they make a move on one side or other of the Great Divide. So it is a place where uncertainty takes her seat beside the bed of the sufferer, watching with ever unshut eye the fluctuating levels of the tide of destiny. It is a place where the meaning of war gets branded deep upon you. ”

“ This was too much for the German soldiers. They strained like bloodhounds on the leash. "Out with them!" said their irate colonel, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the carriages in which these bloodthirsty British officers sat. The colonel, however, did not wait to see his behest carried out, and a very gentlemanly German subaltern quietly urged his men to get back to their train and leave us alone. The only daggers that pierced us were the eyes of a couple of priests, a few women and boys, who appeared to be shocked beyond words that even a clergyman was amongst such wicked men. ”

“ We were on our way, the civilians of Verdun, to Paris and elsewhere, in cattle-trucks and military wagons—a painful journey, in bitter cold and snow, which would have been almost unbearable but for the sight of those merry-hearted troops, swinging along in the daytime on the road bordering the railway, and at night sweeping past us in trainload after trainload in the direction of the town which, shattered by shot and shell though it was, we still pictured in our hearts as home. ”

“ I can imagine the breathless interest with which the garrison in the trenches observed the loading of the mortar, the swift retirement from its vicinity, and the stunned confusion following the first shot. It went off with a stupendous roar, belching forth smoke and flame. The canister, turning over and over in the air, was seen to describe a mighty arc and fall upon a ruined house behind the German lines and there explode mightily, demolishing the place as completely and spectacularly as if a mine had been sprung beneath it. ”

“ If the enemy has not entered our Paris—if Notre Dame is intact—if I, myself, am living—it is because you gave your blood for us. But that is not all. When you fight for France you do not only fight for your country, you do not only save your native land; you save an ideal, an ideal supreme, universal. In helping all that is pure and beautiful in the world you save the liberty of peoples, the liberty of the soul. ”

“ Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them.
"Here,"—we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines—"here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed; feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit." ”

“ Fear isn't the emotion one feels—they [80] would experience the shame of living when so many have shed their youth freely. This war is a prolonged moment of exultation for most of us—we are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes. To lay down one's life for one's friend once seemed impossible. All that is altered. We lay down our lives that the future generations may be good and kind, and so we can contemplate oblivion with quiet eyes. Nothing that is noblest that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the simplest men out here to-day. ”

“ I tried to picture youths advancing under the smoke of artillery, through fields mowed by machine guns, dropping a moment into craters ploughed out by giant shells, creeping out under other curtains of smoke and reaching at last that other line of youths—then the thrust, the stab or the fight to the death with teeth and claws. I tried to picture young husbands and fathers and lovers, and even jolly good fellows, getting used to this—but I failed. I am an incorrigible mollycoddle.
"What is the war doing to the soldiers?" ”

“ I embrace you with all the ardor of my immense love, which has increased a hundredfold during my absence in the midst of the dangers and hardships of the war. Here, far away from the world, always with the image of imminent death, I have felt how strong are the ties that bind us to this world; how mankind is in need of mutual love, of faith in each other, of discipline, of harmony, of unity, what necessary and sacred things are the fatherland, the home, the family ”

“ Without warning our car shot through a bank of fog into a spectacle of mediæval splendor—a veritable Field of the Cloth of Gold, spread out on the green plains of Flanders.
A thousand horses strained at their bridles while their thousand riders in great fur busbies loomed up almost like giants. A thousand pennons stirred in the morning air while the sun burning through the mists glinted on the tips of as many lances. The crack Belgian cavalry divisions had been gathered here just behind the firing-lines in readiness for a sortie ”

“ Gradually, as Octavie Delacourt fell to examining him, the hideous truth began to dawn upon her, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had never set eyes before on a German soldier; she had never even seen a picture of one. But she had heard tell of their uniform, in a vague sort of way, and suddenly, one might say instinctively, she recognized the ash-grey dress and the round cap of the same colour. How came the wearer of these tell-tale clothes to be in her forest, not fifteen miles from Les Andelys, and within rifle-shot of her native village of Martagny? ”

“ A romantic picture grows up in my mind of a blue night, the laughter of youth in evening dress, lamps twinkling through trees, far off the velvety shadow of water and mountains, and as a voice to it all, that air from La Tosca. I can believe that the silent people near by raise themselves up in their snow-beds to listen, each one recalling some ecstatic moment before the dream of life was shattered. ”

“ Money, comfort, limousines and ragtime are not the requisites of men when heroes are dying. I hate the thought of Fifth Avenue, with its pretty faces, its fashions, its smiling frivolity. America as a great nation will die, as all coward civilizations have died, unless she accepts the stigmata of sacrifice, which a divine opportunity again offers her.
If it were but possible to show those ninety millions one battlefield with its sprawling dead, its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self, I think then—no, they wouldn't be afraid. ”

“ It's like walking through the day of resurrection to visit No Man's Land. Then the Huns see you and the shrapnel begins to fall—you crouch like a dog and run for it.
One gets used to shell-fire up to a point, but there's not a man who doesn't want to duck when he hears one coming. The worst of all is the whizz-bang, because it doesn't give you a chance—it pounces and is on you the same moment that it bangs. ”

“ You know the ineffable hopes that give me comfort because they are the very same hopes in which you also have placed all that is dear to you. When you read these words of mine, I will be free, unfettered and in a safe place, far from the miseries of this world. My struggle will be finished and I shall be peaceful; my daily death shall have come to an end, and I shall have reached the place on high, to the life without end. ”

“ I don't pity the weary men who [78] have attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our shell-furrowed battles; they "went West" in their supreme moment. The men I pity are those who could not hear the call of duty and whose consciences will grow more flabby every day. With the brutal roar of the first Prussian gun the cry came to the civilized world, "Follow thou me," just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went to their Calvary singing Tipperary, rubbish, rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal to that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphitheatre. ”

“ At any moment the gray German tide might break out of Brussels and pour its turbid flood of soldiers through these very streets. Even now a Taube hovered in the sky, and from the skirmish-line an occasional ambulance rumbled in with its crimsoned load. ”

“ It seemed as though her sub-conscious self was aware that the tide of invasion was drawing nearer and nearer to the fair fields and orchards of Normandy, and that one morning she would wake up to find Martagny, Gournay, and Les Andelys in the hands of the Boches. So every day, in those early weeks of the war, she was up betimes and, having carefully done up her grey tresses and put on a newly-ironed blue apron, set forth to one or other of the neighbouring villages, where she would be able to read the latest "communiqué" and pick up any stray item of news that might filter through from Paris. ”

“ You must live! You must live! Years from now your little children will look at you with eyes of love and admiration because you were a soldier in the great war. They will know the meaning of the medal shining on your chest, and for generations they will be proud of the honour of their name. ”

“ For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived, dazed and frightened, amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five-minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating! ”

“ No one ever suspected the German mind of possessing a sense of humour. But that it should prove such easy—and fair—game as Teutonic behaviour in the course of the war has shown it to be is more than the most maliciously satirical could ever have hoped. In turn, and according to their several temperaments, the Allied nations have indulged their wit at the expense of the Boche. The British have guyed him with an almost affectionate contempt; the French have sacrificed him with a wholly contemptuous hatred, and the rest have all scored off him in turn. ”

“ Though there was only one Englishman left to carry on the race when this war is victoriously ended, I would give more for the future of England than for the future of America with her ninety millions whose sluggish blood was not stirred by the call of duty. It's bigness of soul that makes nations great and not population. ”

“ The march through the cobbled streets of Havre rapidly developed into a fiasco. This was one of the first, if not the very first, landing of British Troops in France, and to the French it was a novelty, calling for a tremendous display of open-armed welcome. Children rushed from the houses, and fell upon the men crying for "souvenirs." Ladies pursued them with basins full of wine and what they were pleased to call beer. Men were literally carried from the ranks, under the eyes of their Officers, and borne in triumph into houses and inns. ”

“ This is a glimpse of life in a battalion of one of Lord Kitchener's first armies. It gives an intimate view of the men who are so gallantly laying down their lives for England. Kitchener's Mob has become the greatest volunteer army in the history of the world—for more than three million of disciplined fighting men are united under one flag in this magnificent military organization. Their fighting has become an epic of heroism in France, Belgium, Africa and the Balkans. ”

“ We must rise above that too delicate conscience which says: "Speak? What good will it do? Truth is luminous; it shines before all eyes." Yes, but it must be helped to shine, and without delay.
That is why, I have decided to address the American nation, to tell it that which I know, that which is evident, undeniable—to take it to the frightful and divine Calvary of truth.
For six months I have been living among our soldiers, [123] our wounded. I live in my Paris. That Paris that every one visits and that no one knows. ”

“ Imagine a vast stretch of dead country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had been mutilated with smallpox. There's not a leaf or a blade of grass in sight. Every house has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is at night—the scurry of rats. You enter a kind of ditch, called a trench; it leads on to another and another in an unjoyful maze. From the sides feet stick out, and arms and faces—the dead of previous encounters. "One of our chaps," you say casually, recognizing him by his [68] boots or khaki, or "Poor blighter—a Hun!" ”

“ I leave the failings of life, I leave sin, I leave the sad and afflicted spectacle of the small and momentary triumphs of evil over good. I leave to my humble body the weight of all my chains and I fly away, free, free in the end, to the heavens above, where resides our Father, to the heavens above, where His holy will is always done. ”

“ Landscapes have lost their beauty, everything God-made and man-made is destroyed except man's power to endure with a smile the things he once most dreaded, because he believes that only so may he be righteous in his own eyes. How one has longed for that sure confidence in the petty failings of little living—the confidence to believe that he can stand up and suffer for principle! God has given all men who are out here that opportunity—the supremest that can be hoped for—so, in spite of exile, Christmas for most of us will be a happy day. Does one see more truly life's worth on a battlefield? ”

“ Death got him at last, but those boys of his—as he used to call his soldiers—will not believe it, even though they carved his tomb out of the rock and heaped the earth over his body.
Gen. Cantore was not a bit like a hero, as one pictures heroes. One might have taken him for a schoolmaster, a clerk in the post office, a retired commercial traveller. He was not tall, nor was his bearing martial. His kind blue eyes looked mildly through his round spectacles. His mouth laughed under his white mustache. ”