William L. Stidger

“ 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." ”

“ Men may sing as they are marching into training-camps; they may sing when they board the boats for France now; they may sing as they march into rest-billets, but they were not singing that day as they marched into the great battle-line of Europe.
I heard no laughter. I heard no loud talking, I heard no singing; I heard only the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, and the crunching of the great motor-trucks, and the patter of horses as the officers galloped along their lines. That army of American men knew that the job on which they were entering was not child's play. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the silhouette of that great ship, lined with khaki-clad American boys, waiting, watching, as seen from another transport, where the watcher who writes this story stands, is a sight never to be equalled in art or story. To see the huge bulk of a great transport just a stone's throw away, moving forward, without a sound from its rail-lined, soldier-packed deck, is one of the striking Silhouettes of Silence. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ Many things stand out in one's memory of a certain road over which he drives night after night and day after day. There is the cross at the forks of the roads. There is the old monastery, battered and in ruins, that stood out like a gaunt ghost of the vandal Hun. There was the little God's acre along the road which we passed every day. There were always the observation-balloons against the evening sky. There were always the fleet-winged birds of the air outlined against the evening. There were always the marching men and the ambulance trains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ France is full of them. There were the fields full of a million blood-red poppies back in Brittany, and the banks of old-gold broom blooming along a thousand stone walls; there were the negro stevedores marching to work, winter and summer, rain or shine, night or day, always whistling or singing as they marched, to the wonderment of French and English alike. Their spirits never seemed to be dampened. They always marched to music of their own making. ”

“ So is the Christian world standing today on the hill of 'Calvaire.' The storms have been black about the Christian world. The clouds have seemed impenetrable. The earth has been desolate. We have walked on our hands and knees and in our bare feet up the flinty road of Baupaume, 'the saddest road in Christendom,' and along this road we have borne the cross. We, the Christian world, the mothers, the fathers, the little children, have bled. We have stumbled and fallen along the way. ”

“ And as we stood there on that Calvary, built in memory of the crucifixion and resurrection and ascension of their Master by the peasants, and looked down over the earth, bright with crimson poppies everywhere in field and hill, brilliant with the old-gold blossom of the broom flower, as we stood there, our hearts subdued to awe and wonder, looking down, suddenly the rain ceased and the sun shone in its full glory and lighted anew the white marble of the figures of the ascension far below us in the field. ”

“ And when we climbed the hill of Calvary, as we have been doing for these years of war, the clouds darkened and we saw only the ominous silhouettes of the three crosses.
"But the sun is now breaking the clouds, and it shall burn its way to a glorious day. Across the fields we see the open tomb and the resurrection is about to dawn; the day of brotherhood, democracy, justice, love, and peace forever.
"Hope is in the world, hope brooding, hope dominant, hope triumphant, hope in its supreme ascension." ”

“ 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" ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so it is all over France; where I have worked in some twenty hospitals—from the first-aid dressing-stations back through the evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals—and have found that the reaction of our boys to wounds and suffering is always a spiritual reaction. I know as I know no other thing, that the boys of America are to come back, wounded or otherwise, a better crowd of men than they went away. They are men reborn, and when they come back, when it's "over, over there," there is to be a nation reborn because of the leaven that is within their souls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 château here and there against the hillside or crowning its summit ”

“ 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. ”

“ Two o'clock in the morning on the sea is sometimes cold and disagreeable, and sometimes it is glorious with wonder and beauty. But whether it is beautiful or whether it is cold and disagreeable, at that exact hour in the war zone on every American transport, now, every boy is summoned on deck until daylight. This is only one of the many precautions that the navy is taking to save life in case of a U-boat attack. One thing that ought to comfort every mother and father in America is the care that is manifested and the precautions that are taken by the navy in getting the soldiers to France. ”