Soldier Silhouettes on our Front Part 6

"Then lifting His hands He said lowly, Of such is my Kingdom, and then Took the little brown babes in the holy White hands of the Savior of men; Held them close to His breast and caressed them; Put His face down to theirs as in prayer; Put His cheek to their cheeks; and so blessed them With baby hands hid in His hair."

And I am certain that last of all I should have heard the voice of the Master himself saying:

"Insomuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these little ones, my children, ye have done it unto me."

Thank G.o.d for a death like that. One could envy such a pa.s.sing, a pa.s.sing in the service to little children.

I have seen some of the most magnificent episodes of service on the part of men in France, scenes that have thrilled me to the bone.

I know a Protestant clergyman in France who walked five miles on a rainy February day to find a rosary for a dying Catholic boy.

I know a Y. M. C. A. secretary who in America is the general secretary of one of the largest organizations in one of the largest Eastern cities. He has always had two hobbies: one is seeing men made whole, and the other has been fighting cigarettes. Never bigger fists or more determined fists pounded down the walls that were building themselves up around American youth in the cigarette industry. He was militant from morning till night in his crusade against cigarettes. Some of his friends thought he was a fanatic. He even lost friends because of his uncompromising antagonism to the cigarette.

But the last time I heard of him he was in a front-line dugout. This was near Chateau-Thierry. The boys were coming and going from that awful fight. Men would come in one day and be dead the next. He had been with them for months, and they had come to love him in spite of his fighting their favorite pastime. They knew him for his uncompromising antagonism to cigarettes. They loved him none the less for that because he did not flinch. Neither was he narrow about selling them. He sold them because it was his duty, but he hated them.

Then for three days in the midst of the Chateau-Thierry fighting the matches played out. Not a match was to be had for three days. The boys were frantic for their smokes, for the nervous strain was greater than anything they had suffered in their lives. The sh.e.l.ling was awful. The noise never ceased. Machine-gun fire and bombing by planes at night kept up every hour. They saw lifelong friends fall by their sides every hour of the day and night. They needed the solace of their smokes.

Their secretary found two matches in his bag. He lit a cigarette for a boy, and the match was gone. Then he used the other one. Then he did a magnificent piece of service for which his name shall go down forever in the memory of those lads. Forever shall he hold their affections in the hollow of his hands. He proved to those boys that his sense of service was greater than his prejudices. He kept three cigarettes going for two days and two nights on the canteen beside him, smoking them himself in order that that crowd of boys, coming and going into the battle, in and out of the underground dugout, might have a light for the cigarettes during the few moments of respite that they had from the fight.

What a thrill went down the line when that news got to the boys out there in the woods fighting. One boy told me that a fellow he told wept when he heard it. Another said: "Good old ----! I knew he had the guts!" Another said: "I'll say he's a man!" Another came in one evening and said: "I'm going to quit cigarettes from now. If you're that much of a man, you're worth listening to!" Another said: "If I get out of this it's me for the church forever if it has that kind of men in it!"

Is it any wonder that they brought their last letters to him before they went into the trenches? Is it any wonder that they asked him for a little prayer service one night before they went into the trenches?

Is it any wonder that they love him and swear by him?

Is it any wonder that when one of them was asked how they liked their secretary, the boy said: "Great! He's a man!"

Is it any wonder that when another boy was asked if their secretary was very religious, responded in his own language: "Yes, he's as religious as h.e.l.l, but he's a good guy anyhow!"

That kind of service will win anybody, and that is exactly the kind of service that the boys of the American army, your boys, are getting all over France from big, heroic, unprejudiced, fatherly, brotherly men, who are willing to die for their boys as well as to live for them and with them down where the sh.e.l.ls are thickest and the dangers are constant.

More than a hundred Y. M. C. A. men ga.s.sed and wounded to date, and more than six killed. One friend of mine stepped down into his cellar one morning, got a full breath of gas, and was dead in two minutes.

There had been a gas-raid the day before, and the gas had remained in the cellar. Another I know stayed in his hut and served his men even though six sh.e.l.l fragments came through the hut while he was doing it.

Another I know lived in a dugout for three months, under sh.e.l.l fire every day. One day a sh.e.l.l took off the end of the old chateau in which he was serving the men. His dugout was in the cellar. But he did not leave. Another day another sh.e.l.l took off the other end of the chateau, but he did not leave. He had no other place to go, and the boys couldn't leave, so why should he go just because he could leave if he wished? That was the way he looked at it. One man whom I interviewed in Paris, a Baptist clergyman, crawled four hundred yards at the Chateau-Thierry battle with a young lieutenant, dragging a litter with them across a stubble wheat-field under a rain of machine-gun bullets and sh.e.l.ls, in plain view of the Germans, and rescued a wounded colonel. When they brought him back they had to crawl the four hundred yards again, pushing the litter before them inch by inch. It took them two hours to get across that field. A piece of shrapnel went through the secretary's shoulder. He is nearly sixty years of age, but he did not stop when a service called him that meant the almost certain loss of his own life.

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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a.s.sembles 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 ma.s.s 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."