Book: Soldier Silhouettes on our Front

W >> William L. Stidger >> Soldier Silhouettes on our Front




"O Thou Christ who stilled the waves of Galilee, come Thou into the
hearts of these boys just now, and still their trembling limbs and
tongues. Bring a great sense of peace and quiet into their souls."

"Oh, ye of little faith!" When I looked up from that prayer, much to
my own astonishment, and to the astonishment of the friend who was with
me, the tremblings of those fine American boys had perceptibly ceased.
There was a great sense of quiet and peace in the ward.

The nurse told me the next day that after I had gone the boys went
quietly to bed; that there was little tossing that night and no walking
the floors, 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 our treatment of shell-shock, we do know that
the only cure will be that something comes into their souls to give
them quiet of mind and peace within."

"I know what that medicine is," I told him. "I have seen it work."

"What is it?" he asked.

Then I told him of my experience.

"You may be right."

And so it is all over France; where I have worked in some twenty
hospitals--from the first-aid dressing-stations back through the
evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals--and have found that 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 crowd of men than they
went away. They are men reborn, and when they come back, when it's
"over, over there," there is to be a nation reborn because of the
leaven that is within their souls.




V

SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE

During the last year there has come into French art a new era of the
silhouette. In every art store in Paris one sees wonderful silhouettes
which tell the story of the horror of the Hun better than any words can
paint it, and when one attempts to paint it he must attempt it in word
silhouettes.

The silhouette catches the picture better than color. Gaunt, naked,
ruined cathedrals, homes, towers, and forests are better pictured in
black silhouettes than any other way. There is nothing much left in
some places in France but silhouettes.

Those who have seen Rheims know that the best reproduction of its ruins
has been conveyed by the simple silhouette of the artist. There it
stands outlined against the sky. Rheims that was once the wonder of
the world is now naked ruins, tottering walls, with its towers still
standing, looming against the sky like tottering trees. And when,
during the past year, the walls fell, they:

"Left a lonesome place against the sky"

of all the world.

The church at Albert was like that. Only a silhouette can describe or
picture it. There it stood against the sky by day and night, with the
figure on its top leaning. The old legend of the soldiers that when
the figure of the Virgin fell to the earth the war would end has been
dissipated, for during the last drive that figure fell, and the tower
with it. But forever (although it has fallen to dust and debris,
because of descriptions we have seen of it) it shall stand out in our
memories like a lonely, toppling tree against a crimson sunset!

Every day on the Toul line we used to drive through a village that had
been shelled until it was in ruins. Only the tower and the walls of a
beautiful little church remained. Every other house in the village was
razed to the ground. Nothing else remained.

There it stands to this day, for when I saw it last in June it was
still standing as it was in January. Every evening about sunset we
used to drive down that way, taking supplies to the front-line huts.
Many things stand out in one's memory of a certain road over which he
drives night after night and day after day. There is the cross at the
forks of the roads. There is the old monastery, battered and in ruins,
that stood out like a gaunt ghost of the vandal Hun. There was the
little God's acre along the road which we passed every day. There were
always the observation-balloons against the evening sky. There were
always the fleet-winged birds of the air outlined against the evening.
There were always the marching men and the ambulance trains. But
standing out above them all, etched with the acid of regret and anger
and horror, stood that lonely tower. Night after night we approached
it with a beautiful sunset off to the west where the Germans lay buried
in their trenches. Coming back from the German lines we would see this
church-tower outlined against the crimson sky like a finger pointing
God-ward, and declaring to all the world that the God above would
avenge this silent, accusing Silhouette of Sacrilege.

There has been a good deal of discussion over a certain book entitled
"I Accuse." I never saw that finger pointing into the sky as we drove
through this village that it did not cry out to the heavens and across
the short miles to the German Huns, looking down, as it did, at its
feet where the ruined homes lay, the village that it had mothered and
fathered, the village that had worshipped within its simple walls, the
village that had brought its joys and sorrows there, the village that
had buried the dead within its shadows, the village that had brought
its young there to be married and its aged to be buried; there it
stood, night after night, against the crimson sky sometimes, against
the golden sky at other times; against the rose, against the blue,
against the purple sunsets; and ever it thundered: "I accuse! I
accuse! I accuse!"

Then there is that Silhouette of Sacrilege up on the Baupaume Road.
This is called "the saddest road in Christendom," because more men have
been killed along its scarred pathway than along any other road in all
the world. Not even the road to Calvary was as sad as this road.

Along this road when the French held it, during the first year of the
war, they gathered their dead together and buried them in a little
cemetery. Above the sacred remains of their comrades these French
soldiers erected a simple bronze cross as a symbol not only of the
faith of the nation, but a symbol also of the cause in which they had
died.

A few months later when the Germans had recaptured this spot, and it
had been fought over, and the bronze cross still stood, the Hun, too,
gathered his dead together and buried them side by side with the
French. Then he did a characteristic thing. He got a large stone as a
base and mounted a cannon-ball on top of this stone, and left it there,
side by side with the French cross.

Whether he meant it or not, his sacrilege stands as a fitting
expression of his philosophy, the philosophy of the brute, the religion
of the granite rock and the iron cannon-ball.

He told his own story here. Side by side in those two monuments the
contrast is made, the causes are placed. One is the cause of the
cross, the cause of men willing to die for brotherhood; the other is
the cause of those who are willing to kill to conquer.

And these two monuments, side by side on the Baupaume Road, stand out
as one of the Silhouettes of Sacrilege.

Then there is St. Gervais. On Good Friday afternoon a Hun shell
pierced the side of this beautiful cathedral as the spear-thrust
pierced the side of the Master so long ago. On the very hour that
Jesus was crucified back on that other and first Good Friday the Hun
threw his bolt of death into the nave of this church, and crucified
seventy-five people kneeling in memory of their Saviour's death.

I was in that church an hour after this terrible sacrilege happened.
Never can one forget the scene. I dare not describe it here in its
awful details.

The entire arches of stone that held up the roof had fallen in from the
concussion of the gases of the shell. Three feet of solid stones
covered the floor. Men and women were being carried out. Silk hats,
canes, shoes, hats, baby clothes, an expensive fur, lay buried in the
stone and dirt.

As I stood horrified, looking on this scene of death and destruction,
the phrase came into my heart:

"And the veil of the temple was rent in twain."


And this scene, too, shall remain as one of the Silhouettes of
Sacrilege.

But perhaps the worst Silhouette of Sacrilege that the film of one's
memory has brought away from France is that of a certain afternoon in
Paris.

I happened to be walking along the Boulevard to my hotel. The big gun
had been throwing its shells into the city all day. Suddenly one fell
so close to where I was walking that it broke the windows around me,
and I was nearly thrown to my feet. In my soul I cursed the Hun, as
all who have lived in Paris finally come to be doing as each shell
bursts. But I had more reason to curse than I knew at that moment.

The people were running into a side street, the next one toward which I
was approaching. I followed the crowd. My uniform got me past the
gendarmes in through a little court, up a pair of stairs where the
shell had penetrated the walls of a maternity hospital.

What I saw there in that room shall make me hate the Hun forever.

New-born babes had been killed, a nurse and two mothers. When I
thought of the expectant homes into which those babes had come, when I
thought of the fathers at the front who would never see again either
their wives or those new babies, when I saw the blood that smeared the
plaster and floors of that room, when I saw the little twisted baby
beds, a flush of hatred swept over me, as it did over all who saw it, a
new birth of hatred that could never die until those little babies and
those mothers and the nurse are avenged. That is a Silhouette of
Sacrilege that makes the gamut complete.

There was the desecration of the holy sanctuaries; there was the
desecration of the graves of brave soldiers of France; there was the
derision of his bronze cross; there was the desecration of the most
sacred day in Christendom, Good Friday, and then the desecration of
little children, mothers of new-born babes, and nurses. Could the case
be more complete? Could Silhouettes of Sacrilege cover a wider gamut
of hatred and disgust than these silhouettes picture?




VI

SILHOUETTES OF SILENCE

Two o'clock in the morning on the sea is sometimes cold and
disagreeable, and sometimes it is glorious with wonder and beauty. But
whether it is beautiful or whether it is cold and disagreeable, at that
exact hour in the war zone on every American transport, now, every boy
is summoned on deck until daylight. This is only one of the many
precautions that the navy is taking to save life in case of a U-boat
attack. One thing that ought to comfort every mother and father in
America is the care that is manifested and the precautions that are
taken by the navy in getting the soldiers to France. One of the most
thrilling chapters of the history of this war, when it is written, will
be that chapter. And one of the most wonderful, the most colossal
feats will be the safe transportation overseas of those millions of
soldiers with so little loss of life while doing it.

And one of the best precautions is this of getting every boy up out of
the hold and out of the staterooms, officers and all, on deck, standing
by the assigned life-boats and rafts. Not a single boy remains below
in the war zone.

Day is just breaking across the sea. It is a beautiful dawning. Five
thousand American boys line the railings of a certain great transport.
They are not allowed to smoke. They do not sing. They do not talk
much. Some of them are sleepy, for the average American boy is not
used to being awakened at two in the morning. They just stand and wait
and watch through five hours of silence as the great ship plunges its
way defiantly through the danger zone, saying in so many words: "We're
ready for you!"

And the silhouette of that great ship, lined with khaki-clad American
boys, waiting, watching, as seen from another transport, where the
watcher who writes this story stands, is a sight never to be equalled
in art or story. To see the huge bulk of a great transport just a
stone's throw away, moving forward, without a sound from its
rail-lined, soldier-packed deck, is one of the striking Silhouettes of
Silence.

Thomas Carlyle once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre
of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the
American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of
eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American
army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the
Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history
beside its Allies, the English and the French.

The news came. The first division of American troops was to leave
overnight and march overland into the Marne line. Our Allies needed
us. They had called. We were answering.

As a tribute to the efficiency of the American army, may I say that the
one well-trained, seasoned division of troops that we had in a certain
quiet sector picked up bag and baggage overnight and, like the Arabs,
"silently stole away," and did it so well and so efficiently that not
even the Y. M. C. A. secretaries, who had been living with this
division intimately for months, knew that they were gone, and that a
new division had taken its place, until the next morning. Talk about
German efficiency--that phrase, "German efficiency," has become a
bugaboo to frighten the world. American efficiency is just as great,
if not greater.

I saw that division marching overland. It was a thrilling sight.
Coming on it suddenly, and looking down upon its marching columns from
the brow of a hill, and then riding past it in a Ford camionet all day
long with Irving Cobb, riding past its ammunition-wagons, past its
machine-gun battalion, past its great artillery company, past its
hundreds of infantrymen, past its trucks, past its clean-cut officers
astride their horses, past its supply-trains, past its flags and
banners, past its kitchen-wagons, seeing it stop to eat, seeing it
shoulder its rifles, seeing its ambulances and its Red Cross groups,
seeing its khaki-clad American boys wind through the valleys and up the
hills and over the bridges (the white stone bridge), through its
villages, many in which American soldiers had never been seen before;
welcomed by the people as the saviors of France, seeing its way strewn
with the flowers of spring by little children, and with the welcome and
the tears of French mothers and daughters clad in black, seeing it
march along the French streams from early morning until late at night,
this was a sight to stir the pride of any American to the point of
reverence.

But all day as we rode along that winding trail I thought of the song
that the soldiers are singing, "There's a Long, Long Trail Awinding to
the Land of Our Dreams," and when I looked into the faces of those
American boys I saw there the determination that the trail that they
were taking was a trail that, although it was leading physically
directly away from home, and toward Berlin, yet it was, to their way of
thinking, the shortest way home. The trail that the American army took
that day as it marched into the Marne line was the "home trail," and
every boy marched that road with the determination that the sooner they
got that hard job ahead over with, the sooner they would get home. I
talked with many of them as they stopped to rest and found this
sentiment on every lip.

But it was a silent army. I heard no singing all day long--not a song.
Men may sing as they are marching into training-camps; they may sing
when they board the boats for France now; they may sing as they march
into rest-billets, but they were not singing that day as they marched
into the great battle-line of Europe.

I heard no laughter. I heard no loud talking, I heard no singing; I
heard only the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, and the crunching
of the great motor-trucks, and the patter of horses as the officers
galloped along their lines. That army of American men knew that the
job on which they were entering was not child's play. They knew that
democracy depended upon what they did in that line. They knew that
many of them would never come back. They knew that at last the real
thing was facing them. They were not like dumb, driven beasts. They
were men. They were American men. They were thinking men. They were
silent men. They were brave men.

They were marching to their place in history unafraid, and unflinching,
but thoughtful and silent.

Another Silhouette of Silence. It was after midnight on the Toul line.
We were driving back from the front. The earth was covered with a
blanket of snow. Everything was white. We were moving cautiously
because with the snow over everything it was hard to tell where the icy
road left off and the ditches began; and those ditches were four feet
deep, and a big truck is hard to get out of a hole. Then there were no
lights, for we were too near the Boche batteries.

"Halt!" rang out suddenly in the night, and a sentry stepped into the
middle of the road.

I got down to see what he wanted.

"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches
to-night, and they are coming this way. Drive carefully, for it is
slippery."

In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and
passed it. A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded
down with American boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front of the
truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks.
One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers passed us. One
can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise,
but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word,
not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty
trucks. The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night
was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the
snow. We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a
snow-covered hill and disappear. Not a single sound of a human voice
had broken the silence.

Another Silhouette of Silence: It is an operating-room in an evacuation
hospital. The boy was brought in last night. An operation was
immediately imperative. I had known the boy, and was there by courtesy
of the major in charge of the hospital. The boy had asked that I come.

For just one hour they worked, two skilled American surgeons, whose
names, if I were to mention them, would be recognized as two of
America's greatest specialists. France has many of them who have given
up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to endure danger to save our boys.
During that hour's stress and strain, with sweat pouring from their
brows, they worked. Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, who
seemed to understand without words, and a motion of a hand, but not
three words were spoken. It made a Silhouette of Silence that saved a
boy's life.

The next scene is a listening-post. Two men are stretched on their
stomachs in the brown grass. A little hole, just enough to conceal
their bodies, has been dug there. The upturned roots of an old tree
that a bursting shell had desecrated was just in front. "Tap! Tap!
Tap!" came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground.
It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a
certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got
back where he belonged.

[Illustration: The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front.]


The beautiful columns of the Madeleine bask under the moonlight. Paris
was never so quiet. The silence of eternity seemed to have settled
down over her. As one looked at the Madeleine under that magical white
moonlight he imagined that he had been transported back to Athens, and
that he was no longer living in modern times and in a world at war. It
was all so quiet and peaceful, with a great moon floating in the
skies----

But what is that awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with
a blow? It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war.
It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women
there are left comfortless in Europe. It is the siren. An air-raid is
on. The "alert" is sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The Boches
have gotten over even before the barrage is up. Hell breaks loose for
an hour. No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading
than the next hour. The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up over
Paris. The six Gothas that got over the city dropped twenty-four bombs.

The terrific bombardment, however, now as one looks back, only serves
to make the preceding silence stand out more emphatically, and the
Madeleine, basking in the moonlight the hour before, more beautiful in
its silhouette of grace and bulk against the golden light.

A month on the front lines with thunder beating always, a month of
machine-gun racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every night, a month
of crunching wheels, a month of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a
month of marching men, a month of the pounding of horses' hoofs on the
hard roads of France, a month of sirens and clanging church-bells in
the _tocsin_, and then a day in the valley of vision, down at Domremy
where Jeanne d'Arc was born, was a contrast that gave a Silhouette of
Silence to me.


One day on the Toul line, a train by night, and the next morning so far
away that all you could hear was the singing of birds. Peasants
quietly tended their flocks. Children played in the roads. The valley
was beautiful under the sunlight of as warm and as beautiful a spring
day as ever fell over the fields of France. I stood on the very spot
where the peasant girl of Orleans caught her vision. I looked down
over the valley with "the green stream streaking through it," with
silence brooding over it, a bewildering contrast with the day and the
month that had just preceded; and it all stands out as one of the
Silhouettes of Silence.

Another day, another hour, another part of France. They call it
"Calvaire." It covers several acres. The peasants go there to worship
in pilgrimage every year. There is a Garden of Gethsemane, with
marvellous statues built life-size. Then through the woods there is a
worn pathway to the Sanhedrin. This is of marble. Jesus is here
before his accusers in marble statuary.

As his accusers question him and he answers them not, they wonder. But
those who have seen "Calvaire" in France do not wonder, for from that
room there is a clean swath of trees cut, and a quarter of a mile away
looms, on a hill, a real Calvary, with the tree crosses silhouetted
against the sky, and Jesus is seeing down the pathway the hill of the
cross.

Then there is "The Way of the Cross," built by peasant hands. It is a
road covered with flintstones as sharp as knives. This flint road must
be a mile long, and it winds here and there leading to Calvary, and
along its way are the various stations of the cross in life-size
figures. Jesus is seen at every step of this agony bearing his cross
until relieved by Simon. Over this flintstone every year the people
come by thousands, and crawl on their naked knees or walk on their
naked feet. Every stone is stained with blood; stumbling, cruelly
hurt, bleeding, they go "The Way of the Cross," and I have no doubt but
that they go back to their homes better men and women for having done
so.

The day that we went to "Calvaire" it was a fitful June afternoon. As
we walked along "The Way of the Cross," across the field, past the
living, almost breathing, statues of the Master bearing his cruel
cross, past the sneering figures of those who hated him, and past the
weeping figures of those who loved and would aid him, and as we came to
the hill itself, suddenly black clouds gathered behind it and rain
began to pour.

"I am glad the clouds are there back of Calvary. I am glad it is
raining as we climb the hill of Calvary. I am willing to be soaked.
It seems more fitting so, with the black clouds there and all. It
reminds me of 'The Return from Calvary' in the painting," one of the
party said impressively.

Up the winding hill we climbed, and there gaunt and cruel against a
sombre sky stood the three crosses, just as we have always imagined
them. The hill was so high that it overlooked as beautiful a valley as
I had seen in all France. It was in Brittany, as yet untouched by the
war as far as its fields are concerned (not so its men and its women
and its homes); but on that spring day as we looked down from the hill
of Calvary we could see off in the distance the tomb, with the stone
rolled away, and life-size angels standing there with uplifted wings.
Then farther along the road, perhaps another quarter mile away, on
another hill, were the figures of the disciples, and the women watching
the ascension with rapt faces, and a glory shone round about them all.

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