1. The Glory of the French Soldier’s Heroism

As much as the German atrocities have done to destroy our confidence in the divine origin of the human soul, the French soldiers have done to vindicate the majesty and beauty of a soul made in the image of God.

I have seen French boys that were so simple, brave and modest in their courage, so beautiful in their spirit, as to make one feel that they were young gods and not men. One day, into one of the camps, came a lawyer from Paris. He brought the news of the revival of the Latin Quarter. For nearly three years a shop near the Beaux Arts had been closed. During all this time the French soldier had been at the front. When the first call came on that August day he put up the wooden shutters, turned the key in the lock, and marched away to the trenches.

Said the lawyer: “I come from your cousin. The Americans are here in Paris. Your cousin says that if you will give me the keys and authorize her to open the shop she will take your place. She can recover your business, and perhaps have a little store of money for you when you have your ‘permission’ or come home to rest. She tells me that she is your sole relative.” The soldier shook his head, saying: “I never expect to come home. I do not want to come home. France can be freed only by men who are ready to die for her. I do not know where the key is. I do not know what goods are in the shop. For three years I have had no thought of it. I am too busy to make money. There are other things for me fighting, and perhaps dying. Tell my cousin that she can have the shop.” Then the soldier saluted and started back towards his trench. “Wait! Wait!” cried the attorney. Then he stooped down, wrote hurriedly upon his knee, a little paper in which the soldier authorized his cousin to carry on the business, in his name. Scrawling his name to the document, the soldier ran towards the place where his heart was the place of peril, heroism and self-sacrifice.

This was typical of the thousands of soldiers at the front, for French soldiers suffer that the children may never have to wade through this blood and muck. The foul creature that has bathed the world in blood must be slain forever. With the full consent of the intellect, of the heart and the conscience, these glorious French boys have given themselves to God, to freedom, and to France.

2. Why the Hun Cannot Defeat the Frenchman

One morning in a little restaurant in Paris I was talking with a British army-captain. The young soldier was a typical Englishman, quiet, reserved, but plainly a little excited. He had just been promoted to his captaincy and had received one week’s “permission” for a rest in Paris. We had both come down from near Messines Ridge.

“Of course,” said the English captain, “the French are the greatest soldiers in the world.”

“Why do you say that?” I answered. “What could be more wonderful than the heroism, the endurance of the British at Vimy Ridge? They seem to me more like young gods than men.”

To which the captain answered: “But you must remember that England has never been invaded. Look at my company! Their equipment is right from helmet to shoe, so perfectly drilled are they that the swing of their right legs is like the swing of one pendulum. I will put my British company against the world. Still I must confess this, that, so far as I know, no English division of fifteen thousand men ever came home at night with more than five thousand prisoners.

“But look at the French boys at Verdun! As for clothes, one had a helmet, another a hat, or a cap, or was bareheaded. One had red trousers, one had gray trousers and one had fought until he had only rags left. When they got within ten rods of the German trench they were so anxious to reach the Boche that they forgot to shoot and lifted up their big bayonets, while they shouted, ‘For God and France!’

“That night when that French division came back ten thousand strong they brought more than ten thousand German prisoners with them to spend the night inside of barbed wire fences.

“The reason is this: These Frenchmen fought for home and fireside. They fought against an invader who had murdered their daughters and mothers. The Huns will never defeat France. Before that could be done,” exclaimed the English captain, “there would not be a man left in France to explain the reason for his defeat.”

3. “I Am Only His Wife”

Human life holds many wonderful hours. Love, marriage, suffering, trouble, are crises full of romance and destiny, but I question whether any man ever passed through an experience more thrilling than the hour in which he stands at the Charing Cross or Waterloo Station in London or in the great station in Paris and watches the hospital trains come in, loaded with wounded soldiers brought in after a great battle.

Often fifty thousand men and women line the streets for blocks, waiting for the trains. Slowly the wounded boys are lifted from the car to the cot. Slowly the cot is carried to the ambulance. The nurses speak only in whispers. The surgeons lift the hand directing them. You can hear the wings of the Angel of Death rustling in the air.

When the automobile carrying two wounded boys moves down the street, the men and women all uncover while you hear whispered words, “God bless you!” from some father or mother who see their own son in that boy.

Now and then some young girl with streaming eyes timidly drops a flower into the front of the ambulance pansies for remembrance and love upon a boy whom she does not know, while she thinks of a boy whom she knows and loves who is somewhere in the trenches of France.

One morning a young nurse in the hospital in Paris received a telegram. It was from a young soldier, saying: “My pal has been grievously wounded. He is on the train that will land this afternoon. He has a young wife and a little child. You will find them at such and such a street. I do not know whether he will live to reach Paris. Can you see that they are at the station to meet him? That was his last whispered request to me.”

That afternoon at five o’clock, with her face pressed between the iron bars, a young French woman, with a little boy in her arms, was looking down the long platform. Many, many cots passed by, and still he did not come. At last she saw the nurse. The young wife did not know that her soldier husband had died while they lifted him out of the car.

The young nurse said that she never had undertaken a harder task than that of lifting the boy in her own arms and leading the French girl to that cot, that she might know that henceforth she must look with altered eyes upon an altered world. A few minutes passed by and then a miracle of hope had happened.

“I saw her,” said the nurse, “with one hand upon his hair and the other stretched upward as she exclaimed: ’I am only his wife, France is his mother! I am only his wife, France is his mother! I give him to France, the mother that reared him!’”

4. A Soldier’s Funeral in Paris

The two boys were incredibly happy. Two mornings before they had landed in Paris. What a reception they had had in the soldiers’ club from the splendid French women! How good the hot bath had seemed! Clean linen, a fresh shave, a good breakfast, a soft cot, plenty of blankets, twenty-four hours’ sleep, and they had wakened up new men. The first morning they walked along the streets, looking into the shop windows; in the afternoon one of the ladies took them to a moving picture show, and now on the second day here they were, at a little table before the cafe in one of the best restaurants in the Latin Quarter, with good red wine and black coffee, and plenty of cigarettes, and not even the boom of cannon to disturb their conversation. Strange that in three days they could have passed from the uttermost of hell to the uttermost of safety and peace. “These are good times,” said one of the boys, “and we are in them.”

Then they heard a policeman shouting. Looking up, they saw a singular spectacle. Just in front of them was a poor old hearse drawn by two horses, whose black trappings touched the ground. Shabbier hearse never was seen. Strangest of all, there was only a little, thin, black-robed girl walking behind the hearse. There were no hired mourners as usual. There was no large group of friends walking with heads bared in token of reverence; there was no priest; no carriages followed after. Saddest of all, there was not even a flower. What could these things mean? How strange that when they were so happy this little woman could be so sad.

Suddenly one of the soldier boys arose. He stepped into the street and looked into the hearse. There he saw these words: “A soldier of France.” He began to question the woman. Lifting her veil, he saw a frail girl, and while the traffic jam increased she told her story. The soldier had been wounded at the Battle of the Marne. He was one of the first to be brought to Paris. He never walked again. “I am very poor; I have only one franc a day. We have no friends. I borrowed money for the hearse.”

The boy returned to his fellows. “Fall in line, boys!” he shouted. “Here is a soldier of France. This little girl has taken care of him for three years on one franc a day. Line up, everybody, and tell the men to swallow their coffee and wine and fall into the procession. Go into the shops and say that a soldier of France lies here.” When that hearse began to move there were twenty men and women walking as mourners behind the body. Two soldier boys walked beside the frail little girl with her heavy crepe. As the soldiers walked along beside the hearse the procession began to grow. On and on for two long miles this slowly moving company increased in number until one hundred were in line, and when they came into God’s Acre they buried the poor boy as if he were a king coming in with trumpets from the battle. For he was a soldier of France.

5. The Old Book-Lover of Louvain

Among the fascinating pursuits of life we must make a large place for the collection of old books, old paintings, old missals and curios. Certain cities, like Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Madrid, have been for a thousand years like unto the Sargasso Sea in which beautiful things have drifted.

Fifty years ago, men of leisure began to collect these treasures. Some made their way into Egypt and Palestine, and there uncovered temples long buried in sands and ruins and all covered with debris. From time to time old missals were found in deserted monasteries, marbles were digged up in buried palaces. Men came back from their journeys with some lovely terra cotta, some ivory or bronze, some painting by an old master, whose beauty had been hidden for centuries under smoke and grime. The enthusiasm of the collectors exceeds the zest of men searching for gold and diamonds amid the sands of South Africa.

Fifty years ago a young scholar of Louvain won high praise because of his skill in dating and naming old pictures and manuscripts. When ten years had passed by, this scholar’s name and fame were spread all over Europe. Many museums in different countries competed for his services.

The time came when the heads of galleries in London and Paris and Rome sent for this expert to pass upon some art object. During the fifty years this scholar came to know every beautiful treasure in Europe.

In the old castles of Austria, in a monastery of Bohemia, in the house of an ancient Italian family, in certain second-hand bookstores, in out-of-the-way towns he found treasures as precious as pearls and diamonds raked out of the muck-heap.

When death took away his only son and left his little grandchildren dependent upon himself the old book-lover looked forward serenely into the future. He knew that every year his treasures were growing more and more valuable. Living in his home in Louvain he received from time to time visits from experts, who came in from all the cities of the world to see his treasures, and if possible, to buy some rare book.

Then, in August, 1914, came the great catastrophe, as came the explosion of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii under hot ashes and flaming fire.

One morning the old scholar was startled by the noise and confusion in the street. Looking down from his window he saw German soldiers, German horsemen, German cannon. He beheld women and children lined up on the sidewalk. He saw German soldiers assault old men. He saw them carrying the furniture, rugs and carpets out of the houses. He saw the flames coming out of the roofs of houses a block away.

A moment later an old university professor pounded upon his door and called out that they must flee for their lives. There was only time to pick out one satchel and fill it with his precious manuscripts and costly missals. Then the two old scholars fled into the street with the grandchildren. Fortunately a Belgian driving a two-wheeled coal cart was passing by. Into the cart climbed the little grandchildren. Carefully the satchel filled with its treasures was also lifted into place.

At that moment a German shell exploded beside the cart. When the old book-lover recovered consciousness the cart was gone, the grandchildren were dead and of all his art treasures there was left only one little book upon which some scholar of the twelfth century had toiled with loving hands.

Carried forward among the refugees several hours later, Belgian soldiers lifted the old man into a train that was carrying the wounded down to Havre. In his hand the collector held the precious book. Excitement and sorrow had broken his heart. His mind also wandered. He was no longer able to understand the cosmic terror and blackness. A noble officer, himself wounded, put his coat under the old man’s head and made a pillow and bade him forget the German beast, the bomb shells, the blazing city. But all these foul deeds and all dangers now were as naught to the old man.

“See my little book,” he said. “How beautiful the lettering! Why, upon this book, as upon a ship, civilization sailed across the dark waters of the Middle Ages. Look at this book of beauty. The ugliness of the tenth century is dead. The cruelty and the slavery of bloody tyrants is dead also. The old cannon are quite rusted away. But look at this! Behold, its beauty is immortal! Everything else dies. Soon all the smoke and blood will go, but beauty and love and liberty will remain.”

And then lifting the little book the old collector of Louvain pressed his lips to the vellum page, bright with the blue and crimson and gold of seven hundred years, and in a moment passed to the soul’s summer land, where no shriek of German shells rends the air, where wicked Germans have ceased from troubling and where the French and Belgians, worn by the cruelty of the Huns, are now at rest and peace.

6. A Vision of Judgment in Martyred Gerbeviller

To-day everybody knows the story of Gerbeviller, the martyred.

To the northwest is that glorious capital of Lorraine, Nancy. Farther northwest are Verdun and Toul, with our American boys. The region round about the martyred town is a region of rich iron ores.

Some years ago, Germany found herself at bay, by reason of the threatened exhaustion of her iron mines in Alsace-Lorraine. The news that France had uncovered new beds of iron ore stirred Germany to a frenzy of envy and longing.

High grade iron ore meant a new financial era for France. The exhaustion of Germany’s iron mines meant industrial depression, and finally a second and third rate position. Rather than lose her place Germany determined to go to war with France and Belgium and grab their iron mines. To break down resistance on the part of the French people, the Germans used atrocities that were fiendish beyond words. The richer the province she wished to steal, the more terrible her cruelties.

At nine o’clock in the morning on August 27, General Clauss and 15,000 soldiers entered Gerbeviller. Ten miles to the south was the remainder of the German army, utterly broken by the French attack. Clauss had been sent north to dig his trenches until the rest of the German army could retreat.

Every hour was precious. The Germans remained in the little town from 9 A. M. until 12:30 P. M. They found in the village thirty-one hundred women, girls and children, fifteen old men (the eldest ninety-two), one priest and one Red Cross ambulance driver. Even the little boys and men under seventy had gone to the front to dig ditches and carry water to the French.

It took the Germans only two and one-half hours to loot all the houses and load upon their trucks the rugs, carpets, chairs, pictures, bedding, with every knife and fork and plate. At half-past eleven General Clauss was in the Mayor’s house, when the German colonel came in and reported that everything in the houses had been stripped and that they were ready to begin the firing of the buildings.

The aged wife of the secretary to the Mayor told me this incident:

“We find no weapons in the houses, and we find only these fifteen old men, one Red Cross boy, and this priest,” said the colonel.

“Line up the old men then and shoot them,” shouted General Clauss. “Take the priest as a prisoner to do work in the trenches.”

The old men were lined up on the grass. General Clauss himself gave the signal to fire. Two German soldiers fired bullets into each one of the old men.

One of the heart-broken onlookers was the village priest. The Germans carried him away as prisoner and made him work as a common labourer; through rain and sun, through heat and snow, he toiled on, digging ditches, carrying burdens, working eighteen hours a day, eating spoiled food that the German soldiers would not touch, until finally tuberculosis developed and he was sick unto death. Then the Germans released him as a refugee, so the priest returned to Gerbeviller to die.

Then came the anniversary of the murder of the fifteen old men and of the one hundred and two women, girls and children. On the anniversary day of the martyrdom the noble Governor of the province assembled the few survivors for a memorial service about the graves of the martyrs.

Knowing that the priest would never see another anniversary of that day the Prefect asked the priest to give the address at the memorial service. No more dramatic scene ever occurred in history. At the beginning the priest told the story of the coming of the Germans, the looting of the houses, the violation of the little girls, the collecting of the dead bodies. Suddenly the priest closed his eyes, and all unconsciously he lived the scene of those three and a half hours.

“I see our fifteen heroes standing on the grass. I see the German soldiers lifting up their rifles. I hear General Clauss cursing and shouting the command to fire.

“I see you, Thomas; a brutal soldier tears your coat back. He puts his rifle against your heart. When you sink down I see your hands come together in prayer.

“I see you, Francois. I see the two big crutches on which you lean. You are weary with the load of ninety years. I hear your granddaughter when she sobs your name, and I see your smile, as you strive to encourage her.

“I see you, Jean. How happy you were when you came back with your wealth to spend your last years in your native town! How kind you were to all our poor. Ah! Jean, you did us good and not evil, all the days of your life with us!

“I see you, little Marie. You were lying upon the grass. I see your two little hands tied by ropes to the two peach trees in your mother’s garden. I see the little wisp of black hair stretched out under your head. I see your little body lying dead. With this hand of mine upon that little board, above your grave, I wrote the words, ’Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’

“And yonder in the clouds I see the Son of Man coming in His glory with His angels. I see the Kaiser falling upon Gerbeviller. I see Clauss falling upon our aged Mayor. But I also see God arising to fall upon the Germans. Berlin, with Babylon the Great, is fallen. It has become a nest of unclean things. There serpents dwell. Woe unto them that offend against my little ones. For, lo, a millstone is hanged about their necks and they shall be drowned in the sea with Satan.”

The excitement was too much for the priest. That very night he died. Henceforth he will be numbered among the martyrs of Gerbeviller.

7. The Return of the Refugees

The return of the refugees to Belgium and France holds the essence of a thousand tragedies. From the days of Homer down to those of Longfellow, with his story of Evangeline, literature has recounted the sad lot of lovers torn from one another’s arms and all the rest of their lives going every whither in search of the beloved one, only to find the lost and loved when it was too late.

But nothing in literature is so tragic as the events now going on from week to week in the towns on the frontier of Switzerland.

When the Germans raped Belgium and northern France they sent back to the rear trenches the young women and the girls, and now, from time to time, those girls, all broken in health, are released by the Germans, who send them back to their parents or husbands.

Multitudes of these girls have died of abuse and cruelty, but others, broken in body and spirit, are returning for an interval that is brief and heart-breaking before the end comes.

Three weeks ago an old friend returned from his Red Cross work in France. By invitation of a Government official he visited a town on the frontier through which the refugees released by Germany were returning to France.

It seemed that during the month of September, 1914, the Germans had carried away a number of girls and young women in a village northeast of Lunéville. When the French officials finished their inquiry as to the poor, broken creatures returning to France they found a French woman, clothed in rags, emaciated and sick unto death. In her arms she held a little babe a few weeks old. Its tiny wrists were scarcely larger than lead pencils. The child moaned incessantly. The mother was too thin and weak to do more than answer the simple questions as to her name, age, parents, and husband.

Moved with the sense of compassion, the French official soon found in his index the name of her husband, the number of his company and telegraphed to the young soldier’s superior officer, asking that the boy might be sent forward to the receiving station to take his wife back to some friend, since the Germans had destroyed his village. By some unfortunate blunder the officials gave no hint of the real facts in the case.

Filled with high hope, burning with enthusiasm, exhaling a happiness that cannot be described, the bronzed farmer-soldier stepped down from the car to find the French official waiting to conduct him to one of the houses of refuge where his young wife was waiting.

My American Red Cross friend witnessed the meeting between the girl and her husband. When the fine young soldier entered the room he saw a poor, broken, spent, miserable creature, too weak to do more than whisper his name. When the young man saw that tiny German babe in his young wife’s arms he started as if he had been stung by a scorpion. Lifting his hands above his head, he uttered an exclamation of horror. In utter amazement he started back, overwhelmed with revulsion, anguish and terror.

Gone the beauty and comeliness of the young wife! Gone her health and allurement! Perished all her loveliness! Her garments were the garments of a scarecrow. Despite all these things the girl was innocent. But she realized her husband’s horror and mistook it for disgust. She pitched forward unconscious upon the floor before her husband could reach her.

The history of pain contains no more terrible chapter. That night the dying girl told the French officials and her husband the crimes and indignities to which she had been subjected. Two other babes had been born under German brutality, and both had died, even as this infant would die, and when a few days later her husband buried her he was another man. The iron in him had become steel. The blade of intellect had become a two-edged sword. His strength had become the strength of ten. He decided not to survive this war. Going back to the front, he consecrated his every day to one task to kill Germans and save other women from the foulest degenerates that have ever cursed the face of the earth.

8. An American Knight in France

Coming around the corner of the street in a little French village near Toul, I beheld an incident that explained the all but adoring love given to our American boys by the French children. The women and the girls of that region had suffered unspeakable things at the hands of the German swine. Photographs were taken of the dead bodies of girls that can never be shown. The terror of the women at the very approach of the German was beyond all words. The very words “Les Boches” send the blood from the cheeks of the children. The women of the Dakotas on hearing that the Sioux Indians were on the war-path with their scalping knives were never so terrified as the French girls are on hearing the German soldiers are on the march. Even the little children have black rings under their eyes, with a strained, tense expression as they stand tremulous and ready to run.

On the sidewalk near me was a little French girl of about six, with her little brother, perhaps four years of age. Suddenly around the corner came an American boy in khaki. He was swinging forward with step sure and alert. The children turned, but there was no terror in their eyes and no fear in their hearts. They did not know the American soldier; never before had they seen his face, but his khaki meant safety. It meant a shield lifted between the German monster and themselves. Forgetting everything, the little French girl started on a run towards the American soldier, while her little brother came hobbling after. She ran straight to the American boy, flung her arms around his legging, rubbed her cheek against his trousers and patted his knee with her little hands. A moment later when her little brother came up the American boy stooped down, lifted the boy and girl into his arms, and while they were screaming with delight carried them across to a little shop, and found for them two tiny little cakes of chocolate, the only sweet that could be had. The French children understand.

The German motto was: “Frightfulness and terrorism are the very essence of our new warfare.”

Pershing’s charge was: “You will protect all property, safeguard all lives, lift a shield above the aged, be most courteous to the women, most tender and gentle to the children.”

In France our boys have lifted a shield above the poor and the weak, and, having given service, they are receiving a degree of love beyond measure; but there is no danger that they will be spoiled by the adulation of the French women and children, who rank them with the knights and the heroes of old.

9. An American Soldier’s Grave in France

One August morning I was in the wheat fields near Roye. Somewhere in that field the body of a noble American boy was lying. He was a graduate of the University of Virginia; his mother and his sister had a host of friends in my old home city, Chicago. Guided by a white-haired priest, out in the wheat we found at last a little mound with a part of a broken airplane lying thereupon. I pulled the rest of his machine upon his grave and learned that when the French boys picked him up they found that four explosive bullets had struck him while flying in the air after his victory over many German enemies.

With my knife I cut a sheaf of golden grain and an armful of scarlet poppies and said a prayer for the boy and his mother and his sister.

Standing there in the rain I wrote a letter to those who loved him, saying: “When you see this head of wheat, say to yourself ’One grain going into the ground shall in fifteen summers ripen into bread enough to feed sixteen hundred millions of the family of men.’ When you look at this pressed poppy, say, ’His blood like red rain went to the root to make the flowers crimson and beautiful for all the world; soon the fields of France shall wave like a Garden of God, and peace and plenty shall dwell forever there. “Without shedding of blood there is no remission.” Wine means the crushing of the grapes. At great price our fathers bought Liberty.’”

Two thousand years ago Cicero, sobbing above the dead body of his daughter Tullia, exclaimed: “Is there a meeting place for the dead?” What becomes of our soldier boys who died on the threshold of life? This is life’s hardest problem. Where is that young Tullia so dear to that gifted Roman orator? Where is that young musician Mozart? Where is young Keats? And where is Shelley? And where are young McConnell and Rupert Brooke and young Asquith? And ten thousand more of those young men with genius. Where also is that young Carpenter of Nazareth, dead at thirty years of age?

The answer is in this: They have passed through the black waters and have come into the summer land. There they have been met by the heroes coming out with trumpets and banners to bring them into a world unstained by the smoke and din of battle. There they will write their books, invent their tools, complete their songs and guide the darkling multitudes who come in out of Africa, out of the islands of the sea, into the realm of perfect knowledge, love and peace.

10. “These Flowers, Sir, I Will Lay Them Upon My Son’s Grave”

Last August, at an assembly in Paris, Ambassador Sharp held a little company spellbound, while he related several incidents of his investigations in the devastated region near Roye. One afternoon the captain stopped his military automobile upon the edge of what had once been a village. Surveyors were tracing the road and making measurements in the hope of establishing the former location of the cellar and the house that stood above it. An old gray-haired Frenchman had the matter in charge. He had lost the cellar of his house. Also, the trees that had stood upon his front sidewalk, also his vines and fruit trees. His story as stated by Ambassador Sharp was most pathetic. The old man had retired from business to the little town of his childhood. When it became certain that the Germans would take the village, the man pried up a stone slab in the sidewalk and buried his money, far out of sight. A long time passed by. When the Hindenburg plans were completed, the Germans made their retreat. Among other refugees who returned was the aged Frenchman. To his unbounded amazement the old man could not locate the site of his old home. In bombarding the little village, the Germans dropped huge shells. These shells fell into the cellar, and blew the brick walls away. Other shells fell in the front yard, and blew the trees out by the roots. Later other shells exploding blew dirt back into the other excavations. Little by little, the ground was turned into a mass of mud. Not a single landmark remained. Finally the old man conceived the idea of beginning back on the country road, and measuring what he thought would have been the distance to his garden. But even that device failed him. For the huge shells had blown the stone slab into atoms, scattered his buried treasure, and left the man in his old age penniless and heart-broken.

Long ago Dumas represented the man who had taken too much wine as trying in vain to enter his own home, explaining to his inebriated friend that the keyhole was lost. But think of a cellar that is lost! Think of shade trees, whose very roots have disappeared! Think of a lovely little French garden with its roses and vines, and fruit trees, all gone! “Why, the very well was with difficulty located,” said the Ambassador. But after all, the loss of buried treasure that could never be found is only a faint emblem of the loss of human bodies and human minds. Think of the soldiers who have returned to find that the young wife or daughter whom they loved has disappeared forever! And think of the wives and sweethearts who have received word from their officers that the great shell exploded and killed the lover, but that no fragment of his body could be found! During one day Mr. Chamberlain and myself were driven through twenty-four series of ruins, that once had been towns and villages, but where there was nothing left but cellars filled with twisted iron and blackened rafters. Already, men are anticipating the hour of victory and talking about the reconstruction of the devastated regions, the enforced service of a million German factories, building up what once they had torn down. But the restoring of houses, the restoration of factory and schoolhouse, of church and gallery, represent a material recovery. But the other day, a French woman was invited before the general who decorated the widow and praised her, returning to her the thanks of France, in that her last and seventh son had just been killed. Her response was one of the most moving things in history. “I have given France my all. These flowers, ah, sir, I have but one use for them. I will take them out, and lay them on my son’s grave.”

11. The Courage of Clemenceau

One Sunday afternoon, last August, in Paris, Alexandre, head of the Fine Arts Department of the Government, brought me an invitation from Rodin to visit his studio. We found the successor to Michael Angelo turning over in his hand an exquisite little head of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, carved with the perfection of a lily or a rose. “He is always studying something,” exclaimed the author. But what Rodin wanted us to see was his head of Clemenceau. When the covering was lifted, there stood the very embodiment of the man who is supreme in France to-day, Clemenceau. The sculptor’s face kindled and lighted up. “The lion of France!” How massive the features! How glorious the neck and the shoulders! Clemenceau makes me think of a stag, holding the wolves at bay, while his herd finds safety in flight. He makes me think of the lion, roaring in defence of his whelps. Our descendants will say, of a truth there were giants in those days, and among the giants we must make a large place for Clemenceau.

The invincible courage of Clemenceau is in the challenge he has just flung out to the enemies of France. Reduced to simple terms it comes to this, “It is said that the Germans can get within bombing distance of Paris, or reach the capital, providing they are willing to pay the price. Well, the Allies can break through the German line and gain the Rhine, providing they are willing to pay the price. To destroy Paris means a price of 750,000 Germans at least. The probabilities are that so heavy a price would mean a political revolution in Germany. But what if Ludendorff gets to Paris? Rome was twice destroyed, and later the city of brick was rebuilt as a city of marble. Nearly fifty years ago the people of Paris destroyed their own city, at an expense of hundreds of millions of francs. The motive back of the destruction was the desire to replace an old and ugly city by a new and the most beautiful city in the world. Fire destroyed Chicago, intellect rebuilt it, earthquake and flame levelled San Francisco, courage restored the ruins. Enemies may destroy Paris, genius and French art and skill and industry and will, will replace it. Our eyes are fixed on the goal, namely, the crushing of Prussianism. What if Paris must decrease? It will only mean that civilization in France, and humanity, will increase.” Reduced to the simplest terms, that is the substance of Clemenceau’s appeal. Never was there courage more wonderful. Not even Leonidas at Thermopylae ever breathed nobler sentiments. That is why Paris is safe to-day. That is why France is secure. That is why we await with confidence and quietness the next great offensive for the Germans.

In her darkest hour what France and the world needed was a hero, a man of oak and rock, a great heart, a lion, and the world found such a man in Clemenceau. Nothing fascinates the listeners like tales of courage. Not even stories of love and eloquence have such a charm for children and youth. Many of us remember that in our childhood the crippled soldier of the Civil War became a living college, teaching bravery to the boys of the little town. For months Clemenceau has been going up and down France, heartening the people. This Prime Minister with his great massive head, the roaring voice, the clenched fist, is an exhilarating spectacle. That hero of Switzerland, William Tell, left behind him a tradition that it meant much to him to waken each morning and find Mont Blanc standing firm in its place. Not otherwise all patriots, soldiers, and lovers of their fellow men to-day can look on the great French statesman and patriot and gather comfort and courage from the fact that he still stands firmly in his place.