Soldier Silhouettes on Our Front

range experience. Just before the service I had been introduced to a lad who s

ed horribly, and in addition to his lungs being burn

e said quite simply. I had to bend close to hear him. He c

depended upon me for all the music. In camp back home I led the singing. Even the Y. M. C. A. always counted on me to lead the singing in the religious meetings. Many's the time I have cheered the boys comin' over on the transport and in c

esper service started, he was right th

ing. That sight nearly broke my heart. To see that boy, whose whole passion in the past had been to sing, whose voice the cruel gas had burned out, started emotions throbbing in me that blurred my eyes. I couldn't si

aughter now. I knew that I did, too. So I said to him: "Lad, I don't know wha

d up and whispered through his rasped voice: "I may not be able to make much noise any more, and I may never be

nd courage, and manliness, and daring, and hope. That kind of an army can never be defea

it in, as the Germans have been doing during the last big offensive, according to stories that boys at Chateau-Thierry have been telling me

fear something would happen to upset their nerves. But they made a special request that I come to visit them in their ward. After the service I went. I reached their ward

s?" I asked a little

and I would be up against it. They were coming over in droves, and we were mowing them down so fast that out in front of our company they looked like stacks of hay, the dead Germans piled up everywher

coming you're al

or them; but if your mind is on something else, as mine was that day, and the thing bursts close, it

or I was unconscious for a half-hour. When I came to

her lad, from Kansas, for I saw at on

om the parapet back of me. I had sense and strength enough to dig myself out. When I got out I was kind of dazed. The captain told me to go back to th

. And there he was, his six foot three shaking from head to foot like an old man with palsy, and stuttering every word he spoke. He had been sent to the hospital at Amiens with a case of acute appendicitis. The first nig

egan to shake,"

after that?" I said. Then I asked

done until I

quit?" I aske

be out of here in a few months; they all get bet

lhouette Spiritual. The doctors say that

erican Shock Troops,'" my friend

ow one thing, and that is that you would give yo

of all Americans to take a peep into that room; if they could see the souls back of the trembling bodies; if they could get beyond the first shock of those trembling bodies and stuttering tongues. And, after all, that is what America must learn to do, to get beyond, and to see beyond, the wounds, into the soul of the boy; to see be

nches men. I saw a lad who had gone through the fighting in Belleau Woods. I talked with him in the hospital at Paris. His face was

bullet was gone and his gun was red-hot. I was lying in the grass where I could see it all. I saw them bayonet him. He fought to the last against fifty men, but, thank God, he died a man; he died an American. I lay there and cried to see them kill him, but every time I

our, and sometimes an eternity in a second. No wonder it makes men of them overnight. No wonder th

through the fighting back of Mont

verything was arranged for my comfort. With this leg gone I might have some right now, according to the way they think, to that attention, but I

o take the officers alive as prisoners. That big top-sergeant sailed into them, and after killing two of them, knocking two more down, and giving his captain a chance to escape, the last German shot him t

will do it. America is like that. And so back of these shaking bodies and these stuttering tongues of the shell-shoc

ank God for the privilege. I think that this is the spirit of any non-combatant in France who has any

wounds and the suffering in the hospitals?"

enchmen. That is the highest compl

hank God, I had the glory of seeing their immortal souls, and to me the soul of an American boy under fire and pain is the biggest

n the glory of the

y evening, and they wouldn't let you come to my meeting!

at we want!" were the stam

just stand, if it'

he background of my mind a picture of a cool body of water named Galilee, and of a Christ who had been sleeping in a boat on that water with some of his friends, when a storm came up. I had been thinking of how frightened those

hearts of these boys just now, and still their trembling limbs and

and to the astonishment of the friend who was with me, the tremblings of those fine Amer

as there had been before. A doctor friend said to me: "After all, maybe your medicine is best, for while we are more or less groping in the dark as to

cine is," I told him.

s it?"

him of my

ay be

t the reaction of our boys to wounds and suffering is always a spiritual reaction. I know as I know no other thing, that the boys of America are to come back, wounded or otherwise, a better