Soldier Silhouettes on our Front Part 7

"And my wife," he added. "You know the boys up at ---- call her 'The Woman with the Sandwiches and Sympathy.' She got her name because one night a drunken soldier staggered into the hut and asked for her. He didn't remember her name, but she had darned his socks, she had written letters for him, she had mothered him, she had tried to help him. They wanted to put the poor lad out, but he insisted upon seeing my wife.

Finally, in desperation, seeing that he couldn't think of her name, he said, 'Wan' see that woman wif sandwiches and sympathy,' and after that the name stuck."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The boys call her 'The Woman with Sandwiches and Sympathy.'"]

And as we knelt in prayer together there in the hut and I arose to clasp his hand in sympathy, I knew that through service there in France, through service to your sons, mothers and fathers of America, this brave man, as well as his wife, were solacing their grief. They were conquering sorrow in service, thank G.o.d.

Yes, there are Silhouettes of Sorrow, but these silhouettes always have back of them the gold of a new dawn of hope. They are black silhouettes, but they have a glorious background of sunrise and hope.

I tell of no sorrows here that are not triumphant sorrows, such as will hearten the whole world to bear its sorrow well when it comes, pray G.o.d.

Up at ---- on the beautiful Loire is my friend the secretary. It is a humble position, and there are not many soldiers there, but he is serving and brothering, tenderly and faithfully, the few that are there. No one would ever think of him as a hero, but I do. He, too, is a hero who is conquering sorrow in service.

His only daughter had been accepted for Y. M. C. A. service in France.

She was all he had. He was a minister at home, and had given up his church for the duration of the war. Both were looking forward with keen antic.i.p.ation to her coming to France. Then came the cable of her death.

I was there, the morning it arrived, to preach for him. He said no word to me about the blow. We went on with the service as usual. I noticed that no hymns had been selected, and that things were not in very good order for the service. I was a little annoyed at this, but I am thankful with all my heart this day that I said nothing. I had decided in my heart that he was not a very efficient religious director until I heard the next day.

When I asked him why he had not told me, he said a characteristic thing: "I didn't want to spoil the service. I thought I would keep my grief in my own heart and fight it out alone."

And fight it out he did. Letters kept coming for several weeks after the cable, letters full of girlish hope about France, and full of joy at the thoughts of seeing "daddy" soon. This was the hardest of all.

He could not tear up those precious letters. Her last words and thoughts were treasures; all that he had left; but they were spear-thrusts of pain also. But bravely he fought out his battle of grief, and tenderly he ministered, mothers and fathers of America, to your boys. Is it any wonder that they loved him, that they went to him with their loneliness and their heartaches; is it any wonder that he understood all the troubles that they brought and that they bring to him?

And then there was the young secretary who had just landed in France.

It had been hard to leave home, especially hard to leave that little tot of a six-year-old girl, the apple of his eye.

Some of us who have such experiences will understand this story; some of us who remember what the parting from loved ones meant when we went to France. One such I remember vividly.

There was the night before in the hotel in San Francisco, when "Betty,"

six-year-old, said, "Don't cry, mother. Be brave like Betty," and who even admonished her daddy in the same way, "Don't cry, daddy! Be brave like Betty!" for it was just as hard for the daddy to keep the tears back, as he thought of the separation, as it was for the mother.

Then the daddy would say to the mother: "I feel ashamed of myself to cry when I think of the thousands of daddies and husbands who are leaving their homes, not for six months' or a year's service, but 'for the period of the war,' and leaving with so much more of a cloud hanging over them than I. I have every hope that I will be back with you in six or eight months, but they----"

"Yes, but your own grief will make you understand all the better what it means to the daddies in the army who leave their babies and their wives, and oh, dear, be good to them!"

Then there was the next morning at the Oakland pier as the great transcontinental train pulled out, when the little six-year-old lady for the first time suddenly saw what losing her daddy meant. She hadn't visualized it before. Consequently, she had been brave, and had even boasted of her bravery. But now she had nothing to be brave about, for as the train started to move she suddenly burst into sobs and started down the platform after the train as fast as her st.u.r.dy little legs could carry her, crying between sobs, "Come back, daddy!

Come back to Betty! Don't go away!" with her mother after her.

The daddy had no easy time as he watched this tragedy of childhood from the observation-car. It was a half-hour before he dared turn around and face the rest of the sympathetic pa.s.sengers.

Going back on the ferry to San Francisco the weeping did not cease. In fact it became contagious, for a kindly old gentleman, thinking that the little lady was afraid of the boat, said: "What's the matter, dear?

Are you afraid?"

"No, sir, I'm not afraid; but my daddy's gone to France, and I want him back! I want my daddy! I want my daddy!" and the storm burst again.

Then here and there all over the boat the women wept. Here and there a man pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pretended to blow his nose.

And so we understand what it meant to this young secretary when, upon landing in France, he got the cable telling of the death of his baby girl.

At first he was stunned by the blow.

Then came a brave second cable from his wife telling him that there was nothing that he could do at home; to stay at his contemplated task of being a friend to the boys.

The brave note in the second cable gave him new spirit and new courage, and in spite of a heavy heart he went into a canteen, and will any wonder who read this story that he has won the undying devotion of his entire regiment by his tireless self-sacrificing service to the American boys?

What triumphs these are, what triumphs over sorrow and pain.

All of France is filled with these Silhouettes of Sorrow, but each has a background of triumphant, dawning light.

There was the woman and child that I saw in the Madeleine in Paris, both in black. They walked slowly up the steps and in through the great doors to pray for their daddy aviator, who had been killed a year before.

A man at the door told me that every day they come, that every day they keep fresh the memory of their loved one.

"But why does she come so long after he is dead?" I asked.

"She comes to pray for the other aviators," he added simply.

It was a tremendous thing to me. I went into the great, beautiful cathedral and reverently knelt beside them in love and thankfulness that no harm had come to my own wife and baby. But the memory of that woman's brave pilgrimage of prayer each day for a year, "for the other aviators," the picture of the woman and child kneeling, etched its way into my soul to remain forever.

"As I shot down through the night, falling to what I was certain was immediate death, I had just one thought," a young aviator said, as we sat talking in a hotel in Paris.

I said: "What was it?"

"I said to myself: 'What will the poor kiddie do without his dad?"'

Then there is that Silhouette of Sorrow that my friend brought back from Germany, he who was on the Peace s.h.i.+p Commission, and who saw a train-load of German boys leaving a certain German town to fill in the gaps caused by the losses at Verdun; and because this sorrow is characteristic of the mother sorrow of the whole world, and especially of the American mother, and because it has a note of wonderful triumph, I tell it.

"I thought they were the hardest women in the world," he said, "for as I watched them saying farewell to their boys there wasn't a tear.

There was laughter everywhere, shouting and smiles, as if those poor boys were going off to school, or to a picnic, when we all knew that they were going to certain death.

"I felt like cursing their indifference to the common impulses of motherhood. I watched a thousand mothers and women as that train started, and I didn't see a tear. They stood waving their hands and smiling until the train was out of sight. I turned in disgust to walk away when a woman near me fainted, and I caught her as she fell. Then a low moan went up all over that station platform. It was as if those mothers moaned as one. There was no hysteria, just a low moan that swept over them. I saw dozens of them sink to the floor unconscious.

They had kept their grief to themselves until their lads had gone.

They had sent their boys away with a smile, and had kept their heartache buried until those lads had departed."

I think that this is characteristic of the triumphant motherhood of the whole world. It is a Silhouette of Sorrow, but it has a background of the golden glory of bravery which is the admiration of all the world.

A recent despatch says that a woman, an American, sent her boy away smiling a few weeks ago, and then dropped dead on the station, dead of grief.

One who has lived and worked in France has silhouette memories of funeral processions standing out in sombre blackness against a lurid nation. He has memories of funeral trains in little villages and in great cities; he has memories of brave men standing as doorkeepers in hotels, with arms gone, with crosses for bravery on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but somehow the cloud of sorrow is always fringed with gold and silver. He has memories of funeral services in Notre Dame and the Madeleine, and in little towns all over France, but in and around them all there is somewhere the glory of sunlight, of hope, of courage. Indeed, one cannot have silhouettes, even of sorrow, if there is no background of light and hope.

For we know that even in war-time G.o.d "still makes roses," as John Oxenham, the English poet, tells us:

"Man proposes--G.o.d disposes; Yet our hope in Him reposes Who in war-time still makes roses."

John Oxenham, one of the outstanding poets of the war, wrote this verse, and for me it has been a sort of a motto of faith during my service in France. I have quoted it everywhere I have spoken, and it has sung its way into my heart, like a benediction with its comfort and its a.s.surance.

It has been surprising, too, the way the boys have grasped at it. I have quoted it to them privately, in groups, and in great crowds down on the line, and back in the rest-camps, and in the ports, and everywhere I have quoted it I have had many requests to give copies of it to the boys. I quoted it once in a negro hut, hesitating before I did so lest they should not appreciate it enough to make quoting it excusable. But I took a chance.

When the service was over a long line of intelligent-looking negro boys waited for me. I thought that they just wanted to shake hands, but much to my astonishment most of them wanted to know if I would give them a copy of that verse, and so I was kept busy for half an hour writing off copies of that brief word of faith.

One never quite knows all that this verse means until he has been in France and has seen the suffering, the heartache, the loneliness, the mud, and dirt and hurt; the wounds and pain and death which are everywhere.