Soldier Silhouettes on our Front Part 5

I saw that division marching overland. It was a thrilling sight.

Coming on it suddenly, and looking down upon its marching columns from the brow of a hill, and then riding past it in a Ford camionet all day long with Irving Cobb, riding past its ammunition-wagons, past its machine-gun battalion, past its great artillery company, past its hundreds of infantrymen, past its trucks, past its clean-cut officers astride their horses, past its supply-trains, past its flags and banners, past its kitchen-wagons, seeing it stop to eat, seeing it shoulder its rifles, seeing its ambulances and its Red Cross groups, seeing its khaki-clad American boys wind through the valleys and up the hills and over the bridges (the white stone bridge), through its villages, many in which American soldiers had never been seen before; welcomed by the people as the saviors of France, seeing its way strewn with the flowers of spring by little children, and with the welcome and the tears of French mothers and daughters clad in black, seeing it march along the French streams from early morning until late at night, this was a sight to stir the pride of any American to the point of reverence.

But all day as we rode along that winding trail I thought of the song that the soldiers are singing, "There's a Long, Long Trail Awinding to the Land of Our Dreams," and when I looked into the faces of those American boys I saw there the determination that the trail that they were taking was a trail that, although it was leading physically directly away from home, and toward Berlin, yet it was, to their way of thinking, the shortest way home. The trail that the American army took that day as it marched into the Marne line was the "home trail," and every boy marched that road with the determination that the sooner they got that hard job ahead over with, the sooner they would get home. I talked with many of them as they stopped to rest and found this sentiment on every lip.

But it was a silent army. I heard no singing all day long--not a song.

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. They knew that democracy depended upon what they did in that line. They knew that many of them would never come back. They knew that at last the real thing was facing them. They were not like dumb, driven beasts. They were men. They were American men. They were thinking men. They were silent men. They were brave men.

They were marching to their place in history unafraid, and unflinching, but thoughtful and silent.

Another Silhouette of Silence. It was after midnight on the Toul line.

We were driving back from the front. The earth was covered with a blanket of snow. Everything was white. We were moving cautiously because with the snow over everything it was hard to tell where the icy road left off and the ditches began; and those ditches were four feet deep, and a big truck is hard to get out of a hole. Then there were no lights, for we were too near the Boche batteries.

"Halt!" rang out suddenly in the night, and a sentry stepped into the middle of the road.

I got down to see what he wanted.

"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches to-night, and they are coming this way. Drive carefully, for it is slippery."

In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and pa.s.sed it. A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded down with American boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front of the truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks.

One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers pa.s.sed us. One can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise, but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word, not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty trucks. The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the snow. We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a snow-covered hill and disappear. Not a single sound of a human voice had broken the silence.

Another Silhouette of Silence: It is an operating-room in an evacuation hospital. The boy was brought in last night. An operation was immediately imperative. I had known the boy, and was there by courtesy of the major in charge of the hospital. The boy had asked that I come.

For just one hour they worked, two skilled American surgeons, whose names, if I were to mention them, would be recognized as two of America's greatest specialists. France has many of them who have given up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to endure danger to save our boys.

During that hour's stress and strain, with sweat pouring from their brows, they worked. Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, who seemed to understand without words, and a motion of a hand, but not three words were spoken. It made a Silhouette of Silence that saved a boy's life.

The next scene is a listening-post. Two men are stretched on their stomachs in the brown gra.s.s. A little hole, just enough to conceal their bodies, has been dug there. The upturned roots of an old tree that a bursting sh.e.l.l had desecrated was just in front. "Tap! Tap!

Tap!" came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground.

It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got back where he belonged.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front.]

The beautiful columns of the Madeleine bask under the moonlight. Paris was never so quiet. The silence of eternity seemed to have settled down over her. As one looked at the Madeleine under that magical white moonlight he imagined that he had been transported back to Athens, and that he was no longer living in modern times and in a world at war. It was all so quiet and peaceful, with a great moon floating in the skies----

But what is that awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with a blow? It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war.

It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women there are left comfortless in Europe. It is the siren. An air-raid is on. The "alert" is sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The Boches have gotten over even before the barrage is up. h.e.l.l breaks loose for an hour. No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading than the next hour. The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up over Paris. The six Gothas that got over the city dropped twenty-four bombs.

The terrific bombardment, however, now as one looks back, only serves to make the preceding silence stand out more emphatically, and the Madeleine, basking in the moonlight the hour before, more beautiful in its silhouette of grace and bulk against the golden light.

A month on the front lines with thunder beating always, a month of machine-gun racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every night, a month of crunching wheels, a month of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a month of marching men, a month of the pounding of horses' hoofs on the hard roads of France, a month of sirens and clanging church-bells in the _tocsin_, and then a day in the valley of vision, down at Domremy where Jeanne d'Arc was born, was a contrast that gave a Silhouette of Silence to me.

One day on the Toul line, a train by night, and the next morning so far away that all you could hear was the singing of birds. Peasants quietly tended their flocks. Children played in the roads. The valley was beautiful under the sunlight of as warm and as beautiful a spring day as ever fell over the fields of France. I stood on the very spot where the peasant girl of Orleans caught her vision. I looked down over the valley with "the green stream streaking through it," with silence brooding over it, a bewildering contrast with the day and the month that had just preceded; and it all stands out as one of the Silhouettes of Silence.

Another day, another hour, another part of France. They call it "Calvaire." It covers several acres. The peasants go there to wors.h.i.+p in pilgrimage every year. There is a Garden of Gethsemane, with marvellous statues built life-size. Then through the woods there is a worn pathway to the Sanhedrin. This is of marble. Jesus is here before his accusers in marble statuary.

As his accusers question him and he answers them not, they wonder. But those who have seen "Calvaire" in France do not wonder, for from that room there is a clean swath of trees cut, and a quarter of a mile away looms, on a hill, a real Calvary, with the tree crosses silhouetted against the sky, and Jesus is seeing down the pathway the hill of the cross.

Then there is "The Way of the Cross," built by peasant hands. It is a road covered with flintstones as sharp as knives. This flint road must be a mile long, and it winds here and there leading to Calvary, and along its way are the various stations of the cross in life-size figures. Jesus is seen at every step of this agony bearing his cross until relieved by Simon. Over this flintstone every year the people come by thousands, and crawl on their naked knees or walk on their naked feet. Every stone is stained with blood; stumbling, cruelly hurt, bleeding, they go "The Way of the Cross," and I have no doubt but that they go back to their homes better men and women for having done so.

The day that we went to "Calvaire" it was a fitful June afternoon. As we walked along "The Way of the Cross," across the field, past the living, almost breathing, statues of the Master bearing his cruel cross, past the sneering figures of those who hated him, and past the weeping figures of those who loved and would aid him, and as we came to the hill itself, suddenly black clouds gathered behind it and rain began to pour.

"I am glad the clouds are there back of Calvary. I am glad it is raining as we climb the hill of Calvary. I am willing to be soaked.

It seems more fitting so, with the black clouds there and all. It reminds me of 'The Return from Calvary' in the painting," one of the party said impressively.

Up the winding hill we climbed, and there gaunt and cruel against a sombre sky stood the three crosses, just as we have always imagined them. The hill was so high that it overlooked as beautiful a valley as I had seen in all France. It was in Brittany, as yet untouched by the war as far as its fields are concerned (not so its men and its women and its homes); but on that spring day as we looked down from the hill of Calvary we could see off in the distance the tomb, with the stone rolled away, and life-size angels standing there with uplifted wings.

Then farther along the road, perhaps another quarter mile away, on another hill, were the figures of the disciples, and the women watching the ascension with rapt faces, and a glory shone round about them all.

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.

As we stood there the thought came to me:

"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 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."

One could not see this Silhouette of Silence, this "Calvaire" of the French nation, and not come away knowing the full meaning of the war.

It is "The New Calvary" of the world.

VII

SILHOUETTES OF SERVICE

A newspaper paragraph in a Paris paper said: "Dale was last seen in a village just before the Germans entered it, gathering together a crowd of little French children, trying to get them to a place of safety."

Dale has never been seen since, and that was two months ago. Whether he is dead or alive we do not know, but those who knew this manly American lad best, say unanimously: "That was just like Dale; he loved kids, and he was always talking about his own and showing us their pictures."

No monument will ever be erected to Dale, for he was just a common soldier; but I for one would rather have had the monument of that simple paragraph in the press despatches; I for one would rather have it said of me, "The last seen of Dale he was gathering together a crowd of little children"; I would rather have died in such a service than to have lived to be a part of the marching army that is one day to enter the streets of Berlin. That was a man's way to die; dying while trying to save a crowd of little children from the cowardly Hun.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The last seen of Dale he was gathering together a crowd of little children."]

If I had died in that kind of service, in my dying moments I could have heard the words of John Masefield from "The Everlasting Mercy" singing in my heart:

"Whoever gives a child a treat Makes joybells ring in Heaven's street; Whoever gives a child a home, Builds palaces in Kingdom Come; Whoever brings a child to birth, Brings Saviour Christ again to earth."

Or, better, I would have seen the Master blessing little children, taking them up in His arms and saying to the Hebrew mothers that stood about with wondering eyes: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

And perhaps I should have heard the echo of Joaquin Miller's sweet interpretation of that scene, for when men die, strange, sweet memories, old hymns and verses, old faces, all come back: