Huts in Hell

Before we reached the edge of the village the batteries became busy again, but at first their objectives seemed to be well beyond the town. Then without warning the fire assumed the intensity of a barrage, and the range was shortened so that the projectiles fell all over "headquarters." Such a spectacle I had never seen before. It was as though the heavens had opened and precipitated an ocean of soil, bowlders, and trees upon the earth. No, rather the earth itself seemed to open as the result of some great sickness and vomit this terrifying spectacle upon us. The ground trembled, and the noise became literally deafening. I stood transfixed behind the runner. I was conscious of no other emotion than one of complete amazement. I had been in the midst of the former barrage, and had not seen it! We were perhaps one hundred and fifty yards away from this one, and so soon does one become accustomed to the eccentricities of shell-fire that we felt ourselves in no danger. We listened to the shells as they described their low arc above us, and knew instinctively whether they would land to the right or to the left, near us or relatively far away. One's judgment in these matters is much akin to his judgment of a batted ball; only he judges the shell altogether by its sound.

But we were roused from our stupor. Off at our left, not far away, a shrapnel broke, the first I had seen that day. For an instant I was paralyzed. The balls flew all about us; dirt spattered us; and then we ran! Straight toward that barrage we sprinted. Our one chance—and I knew it as well as the splendid fellow in front of me—was those abandoned trenches with their caved-in dugouts; we were not more than fifty yards from them. It was shrapnel now and no mistake. That we were not hit is merely one of the hourly miracles of the front. But we did reach, without being wounded, the old barbed wire with the barrage being pulled across the village and shortening in our direction, and with the shrapnel overhead. Both of us dove head first into the trench, and a good eight-foot plunge it was, into slime and water six inches deep. There we waited until the affair was over.

As suddenly as it begins, intense shell-fire ceases; this demonstration against battalion headquarters lasted in all not more than ten minutes. Then, save for explosions well up on the ridge or behind it in the region of the batteries, comparative quiet reigned. With my new-found friend I climbed out of our refuge and hurried into the village. Here I received another shock; aside from three men wounded, several old walls tumbled in, a score of small craters in the streets, and yards of destroyed camouflage the bombardment had done no injury. I was sure that bodies would be scattered everywhere. But the major was at his table, working furiously and as if nothing had happened; the signal-corps room hard by had been mussed up; one shell had dropped close by the wall of the major's bomb-proof, and another had destroyed the camouflage at its entrance; but these experiences were with the day's work. With the first explosions just beyond the town the men had taken to the cellars, and there remained until the storm was over. The last few hours had given me a vivid demonstration of the truth of the statement that I had often heard, but scarcely believed, "It takes a thousand shells to kill a man by shell-fire."

My first inquiries were for Pest, and he was reported safe and waiting for me in the communicating trench; the sentinel at the head of the old road had given him a statement of my movements. The prisoner had been carried in, and presently he was hurried by in an ambulance bound for the hospital. Every hand that I had seen touch his stretcher had been a kindly, ministering hand; and the men who were risking their lives to bring him out had been prompt to express their admiration of his nerve; he was suffering terribly. He in his turn, when bearers "eased off" their load in the hard going of the open field, would say deeply between his groans, "Schön, schön!" ("Fine, fine.")

Shells exploding half a mile away had made me very nervous in the morning; but now as I hurried back, ploughing through the mud and snow of the communicating trench, sinking often to my hips, and pulling myself out as best I could, no sounds worried me. Men were coming in—the relief; they looked clean and fit. A machine-gun company passed me, and was eager for a few words of information. It was great to have good news for those fellows! At last I reached the main road; its inches of mud with firm footing beneath seemed a paradise. The field in front of the batteries had been reploughed since we crossed it in the morning, and there were many new craters about "Dead Man's Curve."

As darkness came down, we reached——home! and home it is to thousands of hungry-eyed lads who have become men in an hour. Home it is to these far-called soldiers of freedom, who pay the sterner price of the world's redemption. It holds them to their yesterdays; it grips them with their past. By its tables they sit and think and write; about its fire they talk and muse. In the atmosphere of its manly decency they breathe deeply and are purified; and the fellowship of those other soldiers who wear the red triangle makes them fit and strong in their hearts. Ah! as I stepped across the threshold of that place fenced with rough boards and set where heaven touches hell, I saw all things become new. We could not win this war without the Young Men's Christian Association; for, even though our armies reached Berlin, our souls would lose their way.

I put my trophies out of sight—the masks and some pieces of shell that I had taken from a shell-hole after I scrambled up from the first shock of the barrage. A few hurried changes were made, and then we relieved Hummel, who had been working like a lonely Trojan all day.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Pest. He didn't even know that he was a hero! When I think of him, I shall always see him as I saw him swinging down the road with the lieutenant, bound for the open field, head up and chin out, leaning slightly forward as he took the long and easy stride of the trained athlete—a soldier and a Christian, under higher orders than any that man ever gave or refused, facing death to be merciful, risking his own life to salvage the life of his enemy.

And Pest is more than one man; he is a type. This one day of his life, a trifle more than ordinary, to be sure, but not unlike scores of days he experiences, is a single page from the ledger of service which the Y. M. C. A. secretaries are writing on every front where freedom bleeds.

Chapter VIII
"GAS! GAS! GAS!"

"Gas! Gas! Gas!" and the hand-siren rang through the dugout in accompaniment to the cry of the sentinel. The first shout sounded far away; I was sleeping deeply. The second brought me to my elbow, and the third sent my hands down through the inky darkness to the mask on my chest. I was wide-awake and in absolute command of every faculty. I remember the surprise with which I noted my calmness. I had feared that in just such circumstances I should go to pieces, or at least bungle things and fail in those first fateful seconds. But I adjusted my mask with precision, with deftness that my fingers had never before possessed; and I recalled every item of the instructions I had received.

I held my breath until the mouthpiece was between my teeth, attached the nose-clamp, shoved the mask far under my chin, and then pressed my face well into it while I firmly fixed the holding-bands about my head. Then I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with the chemicalized air, exhaled violently, and noted with satisfaction the "glub, glub" of the little rubber exhaust that told me the machine was "hitting on every cylinder."

All the while I was fully conscious of the sounds and movements about me. I heard the rats scurry squealing into the corners. I scratched methodically on several inhabited portions of my anatomy. I listened to the muffled voices in the signal-corps room, which was just beyond the thin partition; the men on duty there with the trench telephones wore French masks that had neither nose-clamps nor mouthpieces. But, masks or no masks, signals and messages must go forward without delays. These lads of the signal stations, along with those "standing post" to give the warning, must add to the dangers that all face the extra ones that fall to the lot of men who are charged with the safety of their comrades. I listened to the soldiers stirring in the billets behind me—forty-seven bunks were there; and just across in the first-aid dressing-station I heard the stretcher party.

To all of these matters I was keenly alive while I adjusted my mask (I had on all my clothes), groped for the door opening out of my private sleeping-corner, which was almost exactly as large as the cot it contained, and stepped into the central room occupied by the Y. M. C. A. canteen. Here I found candles burning feebly.

Does this all sound like rare presence of mind and complete self-control? Do not be deceived. It was simply a case of nerves paralyzed with terror and of muscles responding mechanically to suggestions previously received. The acuteness of my perception and sense of hearing were evidences of acute fright.

The canteen soon filled with begoggled soldiers; we stood elbow to elbow, and waited. Was there gas in the room? I wondered. Hardly time for that, because of the heavy blankets sealing the entrance to the cellar; one stairway and one deep-set window were the only openings through which either air or gas could penetrate. These were closed at night. The dugout itself was a kilometer back from the advanced trenches, and on comparatively high ground. I remembered that on the preceding day an officer in discussing a possible gas attack had said that our position was very favorable. But of course the enemy might be sending over gas-shells in a bombardment of the batteries just behind us, in which case our hole in the ground might become a veritable deathtrap to any one without a mask.

The ruins high above us trembled with the vibrations from our own guns. I looked up, and noted that the arched roof of the cement wine-cellar which was the basis for the entire dugout, or rather system of dugouts, where we were quartered did not show even a crack. We were in one of the finest bomb-proofs in that entire sector. After more than three years the direct hits of high explosives had not penetrated it. To its original thickness and strength had been added the tumbled-in walls of the glorious old building which once stood above it. Now and then shells bursting near the entrance to our shelter forced in the heavy curtains with the rush of air following the explosion.

The firing from our own guns became more intense and rapid. What did it mean? Were we under general attack? Was a raid to be received, or were our lads to deliver one? Was our barrage—for the bombardment had assumed the intensity of curtain fire—a reply to German guns, or was it the initiating of a local offensive? I found myself getting out of hand, but remembered the alert officers out there in the greater danger, whose orders would answer my question soon enough.

Now another matter thrust itself upon my attention; my mouth and throat were full of saliva, and I didn't know what to do with it. At this point—and a vital one it is—my instructor had failed me. There are so many things to remember that it is surprising more is not forgotten. I became desperate. My predicament was far worse than a patient's in a dentist's chair with jaws clamped wide open and a rubber sheet jammed between his teeth. In the latter case one can signal with his hands, and indeed, under great provocation, a man has been known to kick the shins of his tormentor. But I knew that neither signalling nor kicking would now do me any good. There were questions, pressing questions, that I wished to ask; and I could not open my mouth to ask them. I could not even talk through my nose, for that was in a vise. My head now felt like a Noah's ark. It was a case of strangle or swallow. I decided that I had a choice between allowing the saliva to pour through the tube into the chemical can of the mask, or of somehow getting it down my throat. I took a deep breath, held firmly to the mouthpiece, and swallowed. Later I learned that I had done exactly the right thing.

Minutes passed, and my eyes began to burn, and my goggles became blurred. I heard muffled coughing, and a sweat broke out upon me; were we to be trapped without a chance for our lives? But no orders came, and we waited on. Being in a group and in the station of a special gas sentinel, I knew that we were to depend upon this sentinel for further instructions and not to "test for gas" ourselves. Testing for gas is done by filling the lungs to their utmost capacity through the tube, releasing the nose-clamp, pulling the mask slightly away from one cheek, and sniffing. If gas is still about, the odor will be detected unless the gas is odorless; and the lungs, being already occupied by air, will not be affected. However, if your test has revealed the presence of gas, your mask has now become filled with the poison, and this must be got out. After readjusting the nose-clamp the lungs are emptied, and refilled through the breathing-tube; then simultaneously the mask is pulled away quickly from the cheek, and the breath instead of being exhaled through the tube is blown violently into the mask itself. By repeating this rather hazardous operation several times the mask is entirely cleared.

But to return to the case in hand. I was fast becoming blinded by the moisture on my "windows." I now followed the instructions of my teacher, and brought out my "window-cleaner," the preparation which each man carries for thoroughly cleansing his goggles. Leaving the nose firmly held and continuing my strong bite on the mouthpiece, which is not unlike the mouth-hold in a football nose-guard, I pulled the bands off my head, the mask away from my cheeks, and with the speed of desperation cleansed the two glasses. After readjusting the mask, to free it from any possible gas I used the method described above.

Nearly an hour had passed. "All clear," came the cry, and again the hand-siren sounded. The reader cannot imagine the relief with which I uncovered my face. The men went quietly to their places; it was now apparent that the real seat of the trouble, whatever it was, had been located some distance away. In the morning we learned that only a "trace" of the gas had reached our high ground. The batteries continued their intense firing, but again we stretched out in our bunks. I had just covered myself when the warning came again, "Gas! Gas! Gas!" and for another thirty minutes I stood at attention. But after the second alarm our relief was permanent. I then made a record of the exact number of minutes the mask was in service, and turned in, to remain undisturbed until morning.

This record, for which special charts are provided, is absolutely essential. The chemical in the British mask (box respirator) is good for forty-eight hours. The can containing the chemical is then exchanged for a new one. The mask itself, with proper treatment, lasts for a long time. While the more quickly adjusted, but far less reliable, French mask is also carried by our men, the British mask is chiefly relied upon. It is complete protection against every gas thus far developed; and the scientific men of the Allies are daily lessening the fiendish menace of gas. The spirit of the men who face the poison is expressed by Corporal Harold Hall of Bridgeport, Conn. In a letter to his mother he says: "We were under a heavy gas for four hours, and, to tell the truth, I'm glad we were, as I was always afraid of gas. But now that I've been through a good gas attack I don't fear it at all, as there is absolutely no danger if a fellow is on the alert and not careless. Oh, this isn't such a terrible war, after all. We are used to it, and do not mind it near so much as you people at home do."

When day broke, we learned of the disaster that had overtaken our lines lower down. The first general gas attack experienced by Americans since the entry of the United States into the war had been directed against our sector. In the marshy ground on our right one company had suffered terribly. Men had died almost instantly; others had been carried back with little hope of recovery; and for several days a large number continued to develop the symptoms of the poisoning. Such is the nature of this fiendish weapon of refined barbarism. For hours it may hide its deadly sting, and encourage its victim by exertion and exposure to weaken himself for its final assault. Absolute rest and protection from the elements are vitally essential in all cases where this breath of death has found its way into the lungs.

The suffering accompanying and following exposure to gas is too horrible to describe. Only a people completely committed to the propositions that the end justifies the means, and that might makes right, could have conceived the gas attack and first used it as a weapon against humankind.

My second serious experience with the gas came in a Y. M. C. A. hut above the ground and farther back. During the shelling incident to a general raid across our lines we used our masks for some time. The introduction of gas-shells has made it possible to reach a much wider area with this fiendish weapon than was the case at the beginning, when only the trench containers and projectors were used, and when the wind was relied upon to carry the fumes into the enemy's positions. Gas-shells are mixed in with shrapnel and high explosives, and when thus employed are often very deadly. Fired alone, they are distinguishable because of their peculiar explosive sound; but, when they are sent over in a general bombardment, the only way to be sure of escaping them is to use the mask continuously.

Old shell-holes are often death-traps because of the gas that settles in them. The poison fumes, being heavier than air, will lie for hours, and under favorable atmospheric conditions for days, in the bottom of a crater or an abandoned trench. Soldiers seeking shelter in these holes are trapped. The French commanding officers at one time issued a general order prohibiting French soldiers from entering shell-holes. In some instances the "active" portions of the trench system are cleared of gas with shovels. Soldiers in masks actually shovel the heavier-than-air poison lying at the bottom of the trenches and filling the dugouts; they fling it over the parapets, where the air can reach and disperse it. The shovels have canvas flappers attached, which serve as fans. Clouds of chlorine gas are also dispersed by the use of a hypo-solution in a special sprayer.

The writer has a friend who entered a shell-hole near the head of a communicating trench which ran from a military road to battalion headquarters. He descended to lay a foundation for a Y. M. C. A. hut, and was completely overcome as soon as he stooped to begin work. A gallant French soldier, seeing the danger, leaped into the crater, and, standing as nearly erect as he could, pulled the unfortunate man to his feet. He held him there until others came to his assistance. My friend went to the hospital for three weeks.

Much of the acute pneumonia and pleurisy, and thousands of cases of tuberculosis, reported among the Allies are superinduced by gas. For days men doctor persistent colds, only to find at last that the "stuff" has somewhere scorched them. I had been five days from the front, and was scores of miles removed from the scene of my last possible exposure, before my case was pronounced "gas-poisoning." For several days my "cold" had been increasingly annoying. My lungs were sore, my throat burned, my vocal chords were affected, and I coughed deeply. The mucous membrane of the mouth, throat, and nose became painfully inflamed, and even bled; my head ached constantly, and my eyes on the sixth day completely crossed. I could not have got more than a touch of the stuff. I have absolutely no recollection of any particular time when the thing might have occurred; indeed, I had congratulated myself that I had been unusually prompt to use my mask and exceedingly careful to take no chances.

Two months later a thorough examination resulted in the following report: "Röntgen examination of the thorax showed increased density of both apices, left more than right; marked thickening of right hilus." All of which means, according to the obliging man of science, that the lungs were left with scars as lungs are scarred from pneumonia or incipient tuberculosis.

In the writer's slight case the depressing nature of the poison because of its action upon the organs of respiration and the nerve-centres was particularly noticeable. For weeks I experienced the constant sensation of smothering, felt "full" and "stuffed," as the proverbial "stuffed toad" looks. At night, when I could sleep at all, I suffered dreams of horror, and awoke struggling for a full breath; then always followed appalling wakefulness. My appetite returned slowly. I was favored with the best of care, enjoyed a delightful ocean voyage at just the right time, and had a perfect general physical condition to begin with. I have the assurance that my glimpse into what so many blessed sons of the republic must behold with wide-open eyes will leave no permanent evil after-effects. But it will cause me to see forever the travail of those who must experience the birth-throes of the new and better world, and the picture of Democracy's youthful martyrs will not fade from my eyes while the flowers of memory put forth and bud.

I think of Liberty Bonds now in terms of gas-masks; one fifty-dollar bond will almost buy two gas-masks!

A driver on a truck or a wagon is especially exposed to the menace of gas. He is entirely removed from the warnings of the special gas sentinel, and the noise of his vehicle gives him no chance to distinguish the peculiar sound of the bursting shell. Down into a bit of low ground the brave fellow swings; a sudden giddiness seizes him. He is fortunate indeed if it is only a whiff and he can adjust his mask before greater disaster overwhelms him.

In general attacks, where gas is extensively used, both sides are compelled to fight in masks; the attacking foe must enter territory he has previously drenched with his poison. With a gas-mask on a man is not more than fifty per cent efficient. In any sort of combat, but particularly in hand-to-hand fighting, it is a fearful handicap. The temptation to tear off the mask becomes practically irresistible. Heroic doctors have been known calmly to lay aside their masks when with their faces covered they could no longer serve their suffering charges.

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"

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,

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,

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