Huts in Hell

Chapter IX

"THEY SHALL NOT PASS" A GAS ATTACK American soldiers in their trenches wearing gas-masks. Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N. Y. An enemy constantly strives to deceive its opponents into believing that gas is about to be used or has been used. If an unhampered raiding party can find trenches filled with men in masks in the all-important second when it leaps over the parapet, the success of its venture is virtually assured. Three days following the first general gas attack experienced by the American army the first general raid on our lines came across. Before the raid exactly the same methods were pursued, and the same demonstrations were made within the German lines that had preceded this first gas-attack. Many of our lads believed that a second gassing was imminent, and got into their masks. Just before the German barrage was lifted from our trench to the territory behind it, and at the exact time fixed for the starting of the raid, German patrols sent into No Man's Land shouted in perfect English, "Gas! Gas!" It was hoped that the Americans would be deceived into believing that their own patrols were giving the warning and that the raiders would find themselves confronted by begoggled opponents. In this instance the strategy completely failed; the raiders were virtually annihilated. It is interesting to note that in the affair just referred to long pipes filled with explosives were for the first time used against us to destroy our barbed wire. These pipes, some of them sixty feet long, were stealthily shoved under our wire, and at a signal were exploded simultaneously, with the concentrating of a brief barrage on the wire entanglements. Large sections of our wire were blown completely out of the ground. Riding from London to Glasgow one afternoon, I became acquainted with a captain of the Black Watch. He was returning from Mesopotamia. For two years and six months he had been in service without a "leave." He was counting the miles to Dundee, and his eyes had the light of the home fires burning in them. We had talked about many things. He had told me of the death of General Maude, of the capture of Bagdad, and had given me what he believed to be the reasons for General Townshend's defeat. Finally I said, "Do you use the gas out there?" and he replied: "No; we have it ready, but we have never used it. The Turks are Christians. They don't use it." His answer gives more clearly than any argument I have ever listened to the statement of the difference between the spirit and programme of the Central Powers and the spirit and programme of the Allies. Gas was "made in Germany"; Autocracy and Absolutism are its parents. Only a stern military necessity has finally forced it as a weapon into the hands of Democracy. Military necessity , I say, for not to meet gas with gas would be like opposing rapid-fire guns with spears. The "culture" that ravished Louvain, and that left on the cities of northern France the scars of rapine and murder that will never out, has made the air a poison breath. Chapter IX " THEY SHALL NOT PASS " GLIMPSES OF THE SPIRIT OF THE TRENCHES We were seated together at a Liberty-Loan dinner in Buffalo. He was in the British uniform and "wore" a cane, not a dress cane, but a heavy stick that took the place of a crutch. A naturalized American citizen, he enlisted first in an Irish regiment. After recovering from a serious wound he was discharged, but a few weeks in New York left him a restless man with eyes turning ever toward the sea. On the thirtieth of November, 1916, he re-enlisted, this time with a Canadian regiment in Toronto. Again he was "shot to pieces." Now he hobbles about with the same nervous eagerness that forced him away from home the second time. Another honorable discharge has not satisfied him, and he said to me, "I hope I get over this so that I can re-enlist, this time under the Stars and Stripes." No man who has been "over there" is ever again satisfied while water remains between him and the front. Not that he forms an appetite for war; he hates war. But so long as the fighters fight he will be in the valley of discontent when he is not on the field of action. In England and in Scotland I found scores of men pining for France. They had been eager to get back to "Blighty." With straining eyes they had watched for her shores through the mists of the morning as the hospital ship found the channel of the home port, but now they begged for a chance to get back. Lieutenant-Colonel Cote, on his way to rejoin in Italy his command which he had left on the Somme when a bullet through his shoulder and back laid him low, said to me: "I could not stay. They offered me a desk in London, and it was tough to leave the wife and little girls; but I couldn't stay." At that time he was one of six men in the British Empire who had three times received the "D. S. O." (Distinguished Service Order)—once in South Africa where he enlisted as a private, and twice in France. After five months he was sufficiently recovered from his third wound to report for duty. What is this spirit, the spirit of the trenches? There is humor in it. Lieutenant Johrens, who returned with me from France, was on the Tuscania when she was sent down by submarine attack. As the destroyer which picked up the boat company of which he was in charge cruised about in the darkness near the scene of the catastrophe, the officers heard singing in the distance. Searching out the spot from which the voices came, they found twenty privates on a catamaran, shouting lustily the refrain of the popular song, "Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here?" The Lieutenant added that a French pastor in Tours on being told the story seemed deeply impressed, but not even slightly amused. The next Sunday, referring to the incident, he said impressively to his sympathetic congregation: "Our brave allies are not only men of action; they are all men of deep spiritual conviction. In danger their thoughts turn instinctively toward God. As they clung to their frail raft in the darkness of the tempest and the blackness of the night, they searched their hearts, and with the mingled emotions of men facing the vast unknown they sang that glorious old Billy Sunday hymn, 'Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here?'" The humor of homesickness makes no pretence, and is unashamed. A chap from Montana came up to the canteen counter behind which I stood, and said, "Say, did you ever hear the story of the Statue of Liberty?" and I replied, "Which one?" He tipped his helmet forward, mocked me with a deep bow, and said, "This one: A fellow had been started toward Davy Jones's locker three times by 'subs.' Finally he got a tub that made through connections; and, as he came up the harbor of 'little ol' Broadway,' he saw the 'Lady' standing up there and looking out through the mist, holding the lamp up to the window for him, and saying, 'Hello, kid; welcome home!' and he swallowed his Adam's apple, stood at attention, saluted, and said, 'Thank you, madam; I'm mighty glad to see you. But, if you ever see me again, you'll have to turn around !'" He didn't wait for a laugh. He knew that the tale had "whiskers" and that many a man now old "had kicked the slats out of his cradle" in protesting against its resurrection. He hadn't told it to amuse me, but to "spill himself." But I laughed just the same, for it was richly done. I watched the artist of the story as he proceeded to unlimber "Jenny," the fifteen-dollar talking-machine that stood in the far corner of the cellar in which this particular Y. M. C. A. canteen was located. No corner of that cellar was as far as thirty feet from any other corner. It was not more than sixteen hundred yards from our most advanced position, and directly in front of a great battery which just then was exchanging "calls" with the enemy. It sounded like a dozen Fourth of Julys outside, with cannon crackers and bombs not excluded. The story-teller fingered through the records until he found the one his mood called for; then he removed his helmet to ease his weary head,—regulations allowed him to uncover while underground,—sat down on a biscuit-box directly in front of the sound-chamber, and, with his unshaven chin in his dirty, cracked hand, waited, close up, for the first word. There, in that old cellar under a ruined French chateau, I heard Alma Gluck sing "Little Gray Home in the West." She has sung it to vast multitudes in great halls, and to distinguished people in quiet parlors; she has set the world a-weeping with the exquisite pain of her song; but she never sang more effectively than she sang that night among the noisome odors of a dark dugout of the front line, with shrapnel and high explosives for an accompaniment and a homesick lad from Montana for her audience. What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of rare comradeship. I never saw a man injure another man up there, or seek to. Quarrels? Sure! and personal encounters now and then, but these are few and far between. There are little time and strength for them, of course, and there are few opportunities; but, when they do happen, they are differences of words that do not have two meanings and of fists that come through the open. I have seen a man carry, in addition to his own kit, the entire equipment of another man who was suffering from gas. Three miles and a half, under the severest conditions of opening spring, through mud-filled trenches he walked with his double load, helping a man he had never seen before. In one of our companies were two Portuguese. One could not speak English. He was terribly dependent upon his "buddy." While I was with the battalion to which his company belonged, the "buddy" was killed. The distress of the man who did not understand the language of the country he loved and for whose just cause he had volunteered his all was most affecting. But how the other men of that company got about him! They swore that he should not have a single lonely minute. Indeed, they nearly ruined the chap with their kindness. They were in a fair way to destroy his stomach with their gifts and his constitution by their vigilance, which actually robbed him of sleep, when a wise-headed corporal took command of the situation and set them right. It is this spirit of man's thoughtfulness for his brother, man's tenderness with man, that reassures me when I ask, "How will this stupendous man-hunt affect the heart of the race?" And the fighter is not unaware of the question. Indeed, he asks it himself. I heard a young major who was saying a farewell to a group of his friends at a church banquet in a Canadian city say, "I go away determined, God helping me, to do my hardest duty; to render my country and the empire an enthusiastic and utmost service; and to carry myself so that when I come back, if I come back, little children will run to me as confidently as they do now ." What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of service that has no interrogation points. One night a shriek of agony came ringing back to our line from a listening-post in No Man's Land. A chaplain was "up," a Roman Catholic. He crawled down the shallow communicating trench to the wounded soldier, found him with a foot smashed by a grenade, unconscious, and bleeding to death. He stanched the flow of blood as best he could, and somehow got the man back. And then, after the stretcher party had carried the "casualty" to the dressing-station, and while they waited for the ambulance, he prayed with the lad. A few days later he said to me, "I didn't think a Catholic's prayer would hurt a Protestant boy." And it was a Protestant padre, we are told, who ministered to the dying Major Redmond on a battle-field of Flanders. There is no "grousing" in the trenches. I heard no complaints from men who were straining their vital forces to the utmost. It is great to hear them when they come out, though! How they do vent their spleen upon springs that are a bit uneven, these fellows who have been wallowing in mud and ice for days without a word in their misery! A runner came in one morning after thirty-six hours of continuous duty. He was chilled to the bone, and one foot was in bad shape. He had neither overcoat nor blankets; his entire equipment had been buried by the shelling incident to a raid. We leaned him against the great tea-boiler, and while he stood there warming his body we poured hot drinks into his stomach. Turning away for a moment, I was startled by a clatter behind me. There he was, his cup on the floor; he was dead asleep on his feet. I have seen lads fall asleep on the rough boards of a Y. M. C. A. hut, with only the nondescript materials for covers that we could hastily throw over them. Not even the noises of great batteries, and of hundreds of soldiers passing in and out, disturbed them in the least. Not a whimper, not a whisper of rebellion, came from them. Oh, I do not believe that I shall ever again complain about any hardship without despising myself. What a task we at home have, to be worthy of them! There are so many tales of unalloyed courage, and so many to tell them well, that I have purposely committed this chapter largely to a very faulty pen-picture of another side of the spiritual portrait of the American soldier. His bravery is very prompt and very honest, and no soldier of the world is braver. He confesses his fear, which is not pretended; tells how fast he ran, how paralyzed his tongue was, how he caught himself saying, "Engine, engine number nine, running on Chicago line," or wiping his forehead with his revolver! But all the time he has not turned away from the line of duty by a single hair. The type of his courage is unmistakable. It would be very poor form for an American to speak of this in any way that would make invidious comparisons, and to speak thus would insult the American soldier, who so thoroughly appreciates and so enthusiastically magnifies at his own expense the prowess of our allies who have done so much for us, who for four years have stood between us and destruction, and who even now must very largely teach us the modern art of national self-defence. "Private Peat" was of course over-enthusiastic in his praise, but he indicated a quality of bravery that I never failed to find in the American army in France when he said: "They are far ahead of the English and French in many ways. They are more active, more quick in thinking, and can decide in an instant what to do in battle. They have already made a wonderful record. Every allied soldier honors them." I saw the native genius of American fliers strikingly illustrated in an aviation contest between student fliers and their instructors. Every event—bomb-dropping, handling of machine guns, and trick flying—was won by the students. And the spirit of the trenches is not confined to those who stand in the mud of the trenches and experience their horrors. In Basingstoke, England, one night I sat with a queenly woman of seventy in front of a typical English grate fire. The war has taken much away from her; and, as she talked with such quiet determination and in tones so rich with suffering, she said, " We who have been in the trenches for nearly four years ——" Ah, yes, the women too have been in the farthest places of the line. The long vigils of the soldier in nights that promise only terror and in days that bring only hardship are not kept alone. The mothers of men, their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts stand there too. And not only these, but the fathers and the brothers denied the privilege of bearing arms, but entering into the supreme ordeals of those who do bear them, by day and by night, in tense silence suffer in spirit the agonies which the bodies of their sons and brothers must experience at every station of the flaming trail that leads from the base to the far rim of No Man's Land. In a city of Scotland one night I was introduced by the "provost," the mayor. He was quiet, but fully master of the situation. At the close of the meeting my host told me that the chairman who had presented me had that afternoon received a message informing him of the death in action of his third and last son. The provost was in the trenches that night. I have watched the long hospital trains pull into London stations during a "big push." I have seen the crowded ambulances dash by, and the dense crowds lining the streets. I have caught at the tightening of my throat when some grievously wounded man has waved a hand, or smiled, or wriggled a foot (if the arm was helpless) at the shouting multitude. And no less glorious has been the spirit of news-laddies who in rags and tatters have pressed their papers upon bandaged Tommies who were able to sit up—laddies from the submerged East Side, pauperizing themselves for a week because their hearts called them. And no less glorious than the spirit of these newsies has been the devotion of the flower-women, just as poor as the boys in "Cæsar's coin" and just as rich in true devotion, some of them in black with only memories to fill the chairs where strong men once sat—flower-women who, with tears in their eyes that for the soldiers' sake they will not shed, crowd about those wagons of mercy, showering the blanketed figures with primroses and daisies. What is this spirit,—this spirit of laughter and of tears; this spirit that goes and that stays ; this spirit that slays without becoming cruel and that turns, as the needle turns toward the pole, back again toward hardness and danger, choosing to walk the trench of death rather than to linger in the paths of life; this spirit that is both old and young, and that flourishes in the thin soil of poverty as luxuriantly as it blooms in the fields of the rich? It is the spirit that I found in the Gillespie home in Edinburgh. When the war came, there were two sons to add strength to the grace that two daughters brought to that fireside. Now the line runs out to the valley of the Somme, and ends there beneath the flowers of Flanders. Tom died in the rear-guard fighting from Mons to the Marne. Bey fell at the head of his men in a charge on the twenty-fifth of September, 1915. Tom's oars (he was captain of the Oxford eight) hang in the hall and his picture at the left of the mantel in the library. Bey, whose letters to his mother have been published as "Letters from Flanders," was the finest scholar turned out by Oxford in a generation. His picture hangs just across the mantel from that of his brother. In that room we sat and discussed the mighty advance just then at its height; the possibility of its reaching the Channel ports, capturing Paris, overrunning France, separating the British and French armies. We discussed the worst ! And then they said, they who had laid so rich an offering upon the altar of liberty: "Back against the shores of this island the British fleet will stand and hold, hold while America brings up the reserves of civilization. They shall not pass! They shall not pass! " What is this spirit? I found it everywhere. The very stones of France cried out with its voices; the shattered trees of the forest were the strings of a harp that sang with it; the eyes of the smallest child were filled with it; and aged men in the fields, and gray-haired women pushing carts through the streets of the cities, were monuments to it that cathedral-levelling shells could not destroy. As a troop-train pulled out of a great station in Paris late one afternoon, I saw a sight that will always remain with me as one of the most appealing and suggestive pictures of this war. Perhaps five hundred people were standing on the platform, saying a last good-by to their loved ones and friends bound for the hungry front. With hands outreaching and faces in the sun they stood in a great tableau of farewell as we drew slowly away. And as I looked into the profound depths of those faces, I was swept by a torrent of emotion that left me a changed man. They, and millions of others they represent, are the fathers and mothers, the sisters, wives, sweethearts, brothers, and friends of unnumbered and never-to-return young men. All have felt the agony of this war's separations and loss, have poured out their treasure and their blood. We cannot speak for them, we who only now begin to enter into their suffering. But we can speak for ourselves; we can deliver our own souls. We too have been in this war since 1914, but until a few months ago France and Britain fought our battles for us. As surely as the principles for which we now fight, and our American ideals and liberties, were governing facts with us four years ago, so surely the same misgoverned power that threatens them now threatened them then. The British fleet in the North Sea, the British Tommy in the trenches of Flanders, and the soldiers of France, have made the wall of iron and the dike of flesh and bone against the flood of autocracy and absolutism that otherwise would have broken through to ingulf Europe, America, and the world. The United States is forever in the debt of those who for unspeakable months held the lines against the day of her arrival. What we do, and all that we can do, will not be an unmerited investment from the standpoint of those peoples who, war-weary and impoverished, yet hold fast. As for ourselves, it is the price of our progress and of our very life. He is less than a loyal American and he is without the knowledge of gratitude who speaks with a slight of the allies of his country. The broken men in London's streets, the cripples by the Seine, the armless lads who wear the badge of far-away Australia, the bandaged ones from New Zealand and the maimed from Canada, leave me blinded with my tears of pride and acknowledgment. The wide-eyed women of Brittany in their simple black, and the children so strangely quiet, the matrons of England, Italy, Ireland, and Wales, and their sisters in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, whose unshed tears are like lost rivers, tell me of my debt, America's debt. And let us not forget the plight of Serbia and Montenegro, the complete agony of Roumania. If our war is just and if Justice never forgets, then the United States will not remain a nation long enough to lose from her memory the travail of these hapless people to whom all is now lost but honor. And nothing that Russia, Russia betrayed by those of her own household and destroyed by an unscrupulous enemy—nothing that Russia does now or fails to do hereafter will wipe from the page of history the imperishable glory of her six million sons dead or maimed, who, inadequately equipped and hopelessly led, were fed in Freedom's name to the ruthless god of war. To-day Democracy has become as one nation; thus she stands or falls. The far-bending line behind Mt. Kemmel and in front of Amiens, and every line that shall confront Imperial Germany until autocracy has been finally conquered, is our line. It is not four thousand miles away, and there is no ocean between it and us. It runs through the heart of the United States and of Canada. Those who hold it with their backs against the wall of destiny, whether they fight beneath the Union Jack, the tricolor of France, or the Stars and Stripes, are soldiers of the Republic. This spirit of gratitude and understanding is the spirit of the American trenches, for in them are Americans who have entered into the sufferings of a world that loves liberty enough to give the best, the last, and all, to preserve it. I found no boasting in our trenches; men did not say, "We have come to win the war." They said with an all-convincing earnestness, "We have come to help win the war ." And now behind our trenches are fathers and mothers and friends; these too have entered into this vast fellowship of pain, and they too begin to know . More eloquently than any words of mine can describe it the verses of Private William I. Grundish, Company C of the U. S. Engineers, A. E. F.,—verses which first appeared in the Paris edition of The New York Herald ,—have given a voice to the soul of the American soldier. Private Grundish called the poem FACING THE SHADOWS. "When I behold the tense and tragic night Shrouding the earth in vague, symbolic gloom, And when I think that ere my fancy's flight Has reached the portals of the inner room Where knightly ghosts, guarding the secret ark Of brave romance, through me shall sing again, Death may ingulf me in eternal dark,— Still I have no regret nor poignant pain. Better in one ecstatic, epic day To strike a blow for Glory and for Truth, With ardent, singing heart to toss away In Freedom's holy cause my eager youth, Than bear, as weary years pass one by one, The knowledge of a sacred task undone." Lieutenant Dinsmore Ely was killed in France in the aviation service on April 21, 1918. On April 29 his father, Dr. James O. Ely of Winnetka, Ill., received a letter from him written just before his death. The letter ends thus: "And I want to say in closing, If anything should happen to me, let's have no mourning in spirit or in dress. Like a Liberty Bond, it is an investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country. It is an honor to a family, and is that the time for weeping?" " It is an investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country. " Here is the spirit of the trenches: it is the spirit that cries, "With this I give myself." It is sacrifice , and sacrifice is the spirit of victory. Chapter X THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD I saw her first in a great base hospital in the north of England. Her ward was filled with wounded British soldiers. In writing of her one hesitates to use the only word in the language of our race that expresses the adoration of those young heroes as their eyes companioned her from cot to cot. One hesitates to use the word because it has been associated with so many small and trifling things, because it has become such a commonplace. But it is the only word: they worshipped her. What I saw in their eyes that day I have seen in my mother's eyes as she arose from prayer; I saw it once in the eyes of a battle-widow kneeling before a shrine in Paris; I caught a glimpse of it in the eyes of my son when, leaning against the cradling embrace of his mother's arms, he looked for an instant with a baby's questioning into his mother's face; I beheld it in supernatural glory near the fortress city of Toul when a soldier of my country, a lad in years but a veteran in sacrifice, in the delirium of his suffering whispered that name which is above all other names in the vocabulary of the dying. It is not the tribute of either sex exclusively, nor of any particular age; it is the supreme testimony of the human soul, and to those who behold it a fleeting glimpse of the things that are "hid with Christ in God." This woman was not old, and she was not young. Her hair was white, and her cheeks were the vivid hue of her native land. She was not beautiful by the artist's test, but it is seldom given to any one to study a more attractive face. A stranger would always see first and remember last her eyes and her mouth; why, I cannot say, for as I write I find it impossible to describe them. She was just above the medium in height, athletic of figure; and she moved about with the unhurried swiftness of the born nurse. But the impression she left upon me was not the impression of one who deftly, tenderly cares for the sick and the injured. When my eyes fell upon her, and as they followed her, and when I turned away from the great hospital, I thought of my own mother. Now, although I am writing of her, the face that rises before me is not her face; it is my mother's face. She stopped presently by a bed that held a fearfully broken lad from London's great East Side. In half a dozen places the shrapnel had sought his vitals, and quite as many times the kindly cruel scalpel of the surgeon had searched out the creeping poison. The foot of the bed was raised so that the bandaged head was inches below the level of the tired feet. When she touched the boy, he smiled. He could not see her,—his eyes were covered,—and he could not move his head. Even the smile must have cost him pain. But I never knew before that a man's mouth could be so beautiful. It was as if the lips had responded to something electric in that white-gowned woman's touch; it was as if her fingers had healing in them, as if her hands bore the same divine ministries that the hands of the Galilean carried to the halt and lame and blind nineteen hundred years before. I found myself whispering, "And the child was cured from that very hour." I saw her next in France and not far behind the lines, and I saw, in the eyes of the men she ministered to there, what I had seen in England. I never learned her story. Somehow I never cared to know it; I never inquired. Once when a chaplain started to tell me, I stopped him. I knew that it would be brave and beautiful; but the war has many stories, and we must save our dreams. I prefer to remember her in the spirit of the words of one her hands were laid upon: "I wonder what she did before she went to war—for she has gone to war as truly as any soldier. I am sure in the peaceful years she must have loved and been greatly loved. Perhaps he was killed out there. Now she is ivory-white with over-service, and spends all her days in loving. She will not spare herself. Her eyes,—ah! her eyes,—they have the old frank, comprehending look of her yesterdays; but they are ringed with being weary. Only her lips hold a touch of the old color. Over dying men she stoops, and is to them the incarnation of their mother or of the woman, had they lived, they would have loved." I saw her first in England and then in France. I shall not see her again. In the air a winged monster paused and let loose his fury. She is not dead, but gone to her coronation. She lives to-day in the hearts of ten times ten thousand women and thousands more, this greatest mother in the world. I came one bitter night in February into the crowded, dirty station at Toul. One of my travelling companions was a lieutenant of the "Rainbow Division," who hailed from Marion, O., and who talked a lot about his wife and baby. His head was clean-shaven, "because," he said, "kerosene was expensive and hard to procure!" On the same train with us were a dozen Red Cross nurses transferring to a new base hospital. They were wonderful girls. Until morning brought the cars that were to carry them on to their destination nearer the line they sat on their blanket-rolls. While they waited, they sang "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "Over There"; and they sang the old songs, "Kentucky Home," "Swanee River," "Tenting To-night on the Old Camp-Ground"; and they sang some of the hymns that have body and distinction and that last, "Rock of Ages," "Nearer, My God, to Thee," "Lead, Kindly Light"; the "Marseillaise" was sung again and again, while we all stood, and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The night rang with their voices. During the informal concert a French troop-train pulled in, and the poilus tumbled out. They heard the singing; and, although they could not understand the words of the songs, they caught the spirit of the singers. Like statues they stood leaning upon their long guns and listening to those women of a far land brought near by the ministry of a common pain. About us were the high-piled sand-bags that re-enforced the abris (shelters) conveniently placed for a quick retreat in case of an air raid. Only a few very faint lights were shown. But the faces of those French soldiers seemed to build a warming fire on the station platform, and the choir lighted a candle that did not burn out. It was a night never to be forgotten. Wonderful is woman, this woman of war! "The bravest battle that ever was fought, Shall I tell you where and when? On the maps of the world you will find it not; 'Twas fought by the mothers of men." And this woman of war is the woman of work. As, in the brave days of old, woman, free of spirit as she was free of limb, carried the extra weapons of her mate into the heart of the conflict, and inspired him to superhuman deeds, bearing equal share with him in the front of battle, so the woman of to-day, for the first time in long generations given equal freedom with man to do the world's work, has sprung to the side of her mate. In the factories of England, in the fields of Russia, in the mills and mines of France, on the firing line itself, and in the Red Cross behind every bloody trench of the war-mad world, she is giving herself, body, mind, and soul, for the preservation of the institutions of her people. I have seen her pushing her cart through the streets of Rennes and Tours, bearing great loads down the highways of Brittany, tilling fields with the first glimpse of spring, close behind the lines. She is in all places, for her tasks are the tasks of the universal need. But England gave me my best opportunity to study carefully the woman of work. A girl sold me my ticket at Liverpool; another took it. A girl gathered the baggage together at the Paddington station in London. Young women were at the desk of the hotel—not a man in sight anywhere. Women are conductors on the London trams and guards as well as ticket-sellers in the tubes. I saw them doing the heaviest labor of canal-boats and harbor tugs. They were ploughing in the country and driving munition-vans in the cities. In one of the greatest shell-factories I saw scores of young women at lathes, and other scores managing intricate machinery with deftness and precision. What price the next generation will pay for these strained bodies—some of the loads are necessarily heavy ones—I do not know, but womanhood asks no questions when the voice of sacrifice calls. One is impressed by the number of wedding-rings worn by the women of work; thousands of wives, yes, and widows, of soldiers are serving Britain in these new ways. Many must add their earnings to the scant home store, and so the babies are cared for by grandparents or public nurseries while the mothers labor for the cause the father fights for or may have died for. In munition-factories matrons are provided who look after the interests of the younger girls. Of course, grave moral problems are arising from these new and complicated relations of women to the world that has for so long been man's world exclusively. These problems will not be solved in a day. After three years of war 4,766,000 women were employed in England, or 1,421,000 more than were employed in 1914. The number of women workers is increasing at the rate of 18,000 every week. The Minister of Munitions announces that from "sixty to eighty per cent of the machine work on shells, fuses, and trench-warfare supplies is now performed by women. They have been trained in aëroplane-manufacture, gun-work, and in almost every other branch of manufacture." In a statement made later, in the House of Commons, the Minister of Munitions referred to the fact that nearly one thousand large guns were destroyed or captured, and between four and five thousand machine guns destroyed or captured, in the great German offensive which began on the twenty-first of March, 1918, and that in this same period the ammunition lost amounted to about the total production of from one to three weeks. But he declared that the loss had been more than made up in less than one month, and that nine-tenths of the huge output of shells which was then sufficient for the continuation of an intensive battle throughout the summer was due to the labor of three-quarters of a million women. I heard a great iron-merchant say: "Ah! sir, the women are saving the country. When I myself urged a holiday upon them,—and not in a year have they taken one,—they said: 'What will our men at the front do when we stop? Will the Germans sit back and rest too? We will have our holiday when the war is over and the lads come home.'" She was just a slip of a girl; but she smiled at the baby boy in her arms, and said, "His father is in France." She continued: "This is my first day with him in ten months. He is asleep when I get home at night, and he is asleep in the morning when I leave for the shop." And she smiled again as she added: "O, he is a fine sleeper, sir, and the ladies at the church [referring to the nursery] have no trouble with him. It is good, though, to have him in my arms with his eyes open." And, though I blinked my eyes hard as I looked at this brave English girl having an enforced vacation from shell-making because of "back-strain," she had no tears in her eyes. And in excess of all that her hands find to do, as when Spartan mothers sent their sons away and with the same spirit, Democracy's woman of work is giving her flesh and her blood to be food for the carrion-birds of countries she has never seen, while still beneath her heart she carries the developing life that is the hope of the future. I saw a great parade in London, one hundred thousand women marching in a vast demonstration after the triumph of suffrage—mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts, little daughters dressed in white, and gray-haired battle-widows of the Crimea. The faces of the marchers were inspiring, but my eyes did not rest upon them. I looked longest at the black masses of men and boys crowding close against the lines that kept the street open for the parade. To the eternal credit of manhood let it be said that the faces of the men were generally faces of old men and that the faces of the boys were the faces of children. But I saw more than the crowd of men and boys. On those faces I saw the light of discovery, and I seemed to hear a voice, a voice that speaks down through the years from a Roman cross, "Behold thy mother." The clamor of the unparalleled conflict has been the quiet in which for the first time woman's cry for justice has been really heard and fully understood. Great Britain, the butt of our jokes because of her stolid slowness and stubbornness in an opinion or tradition, saw her window-smashers turn to munition-makers, saw her social butterflies don the garb of Red Cross nurses, saw her women rise to help win the war; and Great Britain was convinced. And what have we found this "new woman," this woman of war, to be? First of all, we have discovered that she is not new; that she is the woman of old, the woman of yesterday, to-day, and forever. But, while woman has not changed, her times have; and with intelligent heroism she is fighting against fearful odds, to adjust the machinery of society to meet modern needs. One has declared that already three-fourths of woman's former sphere has slipped away from her. Back at the beginnings of the race she was in all things partner of the man. She not only bore children and reared them; she was armor-bearer as well, tent-maker, planter, tender, and reaper of the harvests. But gradually changes came. Men no longer spent all of their time in fighting or preparing to fight. They began to relieve women in the fields and to assume more and more the heavier portion of building-operations. Women found more time for the nursery and kitchen, for the loom and spinning-wheel. As civilization progressed, still fewer men went away to battle, and war became less frequent. Minds with leisure became inventive, and machinery simplified household labors. Even the nursery was invaded; for the cry was no longer, "Give me sons, many sons," but, "Give me fit sons," and the honor in mere numbers in childbearing gave way to the distinction of quality as well. Then, too, the home itself reached out beyond the pioneer clearing which formerly held all of its activities, until its interests became identified with all the problems of a society no longer bounded by family, village, tribal, or even racial lines. It is as unreasonable to insist that women in their social and political relations to-day remain as they were before the advent of the public bakery, the tailor-shop, the candy-kitchen, the public school, and the legalized saloon as it would be to insist that they go back to the spinning-wheel or that they assume again as a normal occupation the hod-carrying of the builder. Civilization faces a female ultimatum to-day. Ah, more than that, it is a racial ultimatum; for effete women produce their kind, and final racial standards are fixed in the womb. This is the ultimatum: Parasite or partner? Woman must be admitted on equal terms to participation in all activities of modern society, or she must occupy an ever-narrowing sphere that will crowd her at last to the soft couch of voluptuous idleness, where Roman splendor waned and Grecian greatness died. Do you say that woman's sphere is in the home? Because I so believe I am intensely concerned that she shall find no barred doors anywhere that open to knowledge and power which will make her more competent in her paramount task of motherhood. For the sake of the future we must not consent to send woman into the social arena short of being fully armed. Woman is to-day following the unerring sex instinct that warns her to keep always by the side of her mate. Her cry for political freedom is a plea for and a movement toward a fuller understanding, a more blessed helpfulness, between husband and wife, mother and son, male and female. Those who grow not together, grow apart. I have seen towering trees fall before the joined cuttings of two axe-men who, working together, with blow following blow, hewed to the heart of the monarch of the forest. I have seen a giant workman laying the bricks of a city pavement, with his left and right hands toiling in perfect unison and with almost incredible rapidity. In the crash of a great line drive on the gridiron I have felt the swaying of the human mass in deadlock, and then the impact of the reserve from the back field that has destroyed the balance and forced the ball over the line. Just as the tree falls slowly before the attack of a single axe-man, just as the paving waits on a "one-handed" layer of bricks, just as the gridiron struggle remains undecided until it has felt the drive of the reserve back, so society waits to-day on the fulness of the strength of womanhood. For the times that are to come with the close of the war we must now prepare; for the reforms that will be possible then, for that mighty new dispensation of social justice, we must doubly arm ourselves. No resources of power available for the world programme of peace, sobriety, economic freedom, and democracy, dare be overlooked. Hear the female ultimatum to the race: a drag or a lift, a plaything or a mate, a parasite or a partner . Chapter XI THE FIRST CROIX DE GUERRE A sentinel barred our way. "Can't take the 'bus' in for half an hour yet." Barnes turned to me, and said, "Shall we walk or wait?" We left the car for the driver to bring up when the failing light would make his journey safer, and hiked up the road. We had been stopped at the edge of the woods between the third and second lines, half a mile from a little village that marked the point within the second line which was our immediate destination. Machines were not allowed beyond the cover of the trees before dark. A few yards above the sentinel who had challenged us the road came under the eye of German observers. Ten minutes of brisk walking brought us to the second line. There had been a great air fight, with eighteen planes in action, only a few hours before; and three Germans had been dropped. An anti-aircraft gun manned by the French was so carefully camouflaged that even when standing within ten feet of the spot where it raised itself unhurriedly out of the earth to go into action, one was quite unaware of its presence. Barnes, an old-time Endeavorer from Ohio, whose business in Cleveland was big, and who brings to the generalship of a front-line Y. M. C. A. division a genius for leadership and a personality that make him a marked man, was in a hurry to be off. A mile and a half of open country lay between us and the most advanced "75's." In front of these was the military road along which were scattered the several ruined villages we must visit before returning to headquarters. The "front line," by the way, is not a string without thickness; from batteries to the most advanced trench it is a mile deep at least. The great battle highway, in front of the hidden guns that are the most exact engines of death the war has developed, is screened carefully from the enemy to cover the passing of trains and men. From it deep communicating trenches run down to battalion and company headquarters, the dugouts, the reserve trenches, the machine-gun nests, and the "laterals" that stretch away for miles facing Germany. The gray of a February evening, whose heavy sky completely hid the sunset, was our protection as we left the second line behind us and swung with long strides across the open. Then, too, we were nearly three miles from enemy trenches, and by the time we had come to closer quarters it would be pitch-dark. Not a fence or a hedge broke the monotony of that vast open space. Abandoned trenches, that in a need could be quickly made war-fit, scarred it in all directions, and shell-holes pocked it thickly. Almost I thought myself again in the dead season of late fall upon the high plateaus of Montana or Wyoming. These craters, the old ones, were not unlike the ancient buffalo-wallows of the West; and the tangled, heavy grass, undisturbed for three plantings, reminded me of the dried virgin turf of my own country. But I got no farther with my comparisons; the sounds in the air and the huge noises in the not-too-remote distance, where the earth rose in volcanic eruptions to meet the sky, were unlike any range voices I had ever heard. Across this plateau of France Death has herded his flocks, and here have been gathered some of his bloodiest harvests. We steered our course by the "farm" described to us by the men on the second line. It was a jumbled ruin overhung with vines, kindly vines that tried to hide great wounds. A bicycle courier, speeding back with messages, set us right again when we lost our way in the deepening darkness; but it was black night when we entered our first objective on the great road. A private directed us to the officers' mess. Winding in and out among the shattered buildings, we threaded our way to an old bomb-proof. As I came out of the night, even the flicker of the candles in the dark, cellar-like room blinded me. When my vision cleared, I saw approaching me a young officer who had risen from the head of the table; he was the "town major," the officer in charge of the village. With his hands he made a vise and gripped my shoulders, as he said, like one in a dream, "Poling, what are you doing here?" and, reaching back a half-dozen years, I cried, " Pat! " It was Lieutenant Robert C. Patterson, of Huntington, Ind.,—but it was not as "Lieutenant Patterson" that I addressed him. We met first at a young people's conference at Winona Lake. He was president of the Christian Endeavor society and teacher of a Sunday-school class in the Presbyterian church at home, an exceptionally alert and vigorous young man. Out under the trees early one morning we talked about the gravest problem a man ever faces, "Where shall I put my life?" Since those days at Winona Lake I had not seen him. He had experienced many changes, enlisting at twenty-one, three years before our meeting in France; and, when the challenge of a vast military need had become unmistakable to him, he had seen service first at Panama. Later he had been assigned to duty at home; and in July, 1917, his eager eyes were among the first in our expeditionary army to see the shores of bleeding, glorious France. His advancement had been rapid, from private to sergeant, and from sergeant to a commission. He was wearing the silver bar of a first lieutenant when we gripped each other "over there," but before I saw again the lights off Sandy Hook—and my return was not long delayed after our meeting—he was made a captain. We did not eat. In his billet we sat on his bunk and talked. We travelled fast and far in a few minutes. Things and times had changed since we last talked together by the quiet lake in Indiana, but some things never change; we talked about those things that are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. But Barnes was becoming impatient; there were long miles to go yet, and much work was to be done. The machine had arrived and was waiting, and machines look better under way than parked on the line. "Pat" said a few things quietly, and then opened his tunic and took out of a deep pocket a well-worn leather case. In it was the first Croix de Guerre given by the French government to an American officer after the entry of the United States into the war. With it was the official citation telling of the high courage and determination which won the coveted cross of honor. "Take it back; deliver it in person," he said. You have not forgotten the story of the first little affair suffered by Americans in the trenches, the story of the barrage, the trench raid, the taking of three prisoners, and the offering of America's first strong lives upon the altar of freedom. You will never forget the young officer who in that "violent bombardment," when communications were cut and re-enforcements held back, conquered the shell-fire to make his report, and then "carried on" until the black morning was over. America's first Croix de Guerre never left its place by the side of my passport and movement orders, pressed close against my body, until the last inch of treacherous Atlantic was behind me. But to me it speaks of the other soldier , not the one I left out there by the battle road under the shell-illumined sky of St. Mihiel, not the one in muddy uniform with the old-young face of a veteran and the insignia of the army of the republic; but that other soldier who gave his heart's full allegiance to the Captain of the great salvation, and who now, in the far, stern place his quest of richer, fuller life has called him to, keeps the faith. As these lines are being written, there lies before me a letter from the mother of Captain Patterson; and in it I read, "It was through his interest in our local Christian Endeavor society that he became a member of the church when he was thirteen years old." Out from the International Headquarters of the Christian Endeavor movement floats a service flag with 140 stars upon it, and every star represents 1,000 men—140,000 young Endeavorers now with the colors in France or in training-camps preparing to go—140,000 young men from the churches of the United States who have not "failed to hear the call of highest patriotism." Long ere these words will find themselves upon the printed page the 140,000 will have become 150,000, and, if the end of this red pilgrimage be not soon reached, the three hundred thousand Endeavorers of military age, and their as yet uncounted brothers, will have found their places in the trenches or behind them, and on the ships of the sea. How quickly they came! From my own local union six officers enlisted within a few weeks; before I left for France twenty-three State presidents, active or past, were in training; and a great city union, that of Des Moines, found itself without a young man left on the executive committee. Within the first year of the war Illinois and Ohio recorded more than five Christian Endeavorers in service for every society. A census of Camp Hancock taken in early December, 1917, revealed the fact that ten per cent of the men in training there at that time were Christian Endeavorers. On no day in France did I look in vain for Christian Endeavorers, and no group that I met there was so small that it did not contain them. My visit with Patterson that night was only the beginning, or rather it was a high point, in a day of continuous Christian Endeavor fellowship. In every Y. M. C. A. hut I was greeted by Christian Endeavorers under helmets and with gas-masks, at attention. What a fine little group that was from Maine! And then there was the brother of a president of the Oklahoma union. In one "hut," after the gas-warning which came while I was speaking had been recalled, a Christian Endeavorer took me to the rise from which an exceptional view of the flares from the guns could be seen. The night was crowded with great trucks bearing supplies and ammunition along the midnight roads. Without lights, and forbidden to use their horns, those unsung, unseen heroes crept along, passing files of soldiers, soldiers marching in and soldiers marching out, facing the risk of the shells that death drops suddenly from the sky to open chasms in the way or to strew horses and men in wide windrows under the ghostly trees. And on many a high seat and behind many a truck-wheel I found my brethren that night. In another hut I was greeted by William E. Sweet, former president of the Colorado union. He sat on a cracker-box, and told me that Christian Endeavor made him, that he is president of the Young Men's Christian Association in Denver, that he is in France, that he is all that he is trying to be as a Christian, under God, because of Christian Endeavor. At ten o'clock that night we turned off the main road, and in a dense growth came upon the last hut within the zone of constant shell-fire. It was strangely quiet. After heavy knocking the door was cautiously opened, and a familiar face peered out at us above a flickering candle.

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