Speaking at the Lafayette Day banquet given in New York the evening of
Sept. 6, 1916, M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, referring to the
service of Americans in France before the United States entered the
war, said:
“Serving in the ambulances, serving in the Legion, serving in the
air, serving Liberty, obeying the same impulse as that which brought
Lafayette to these shores, many young Americans leaving home and family
have offered to France their lives. Those lives many have lost, and
never, even in antique times, was there shown such abnegation and
generosity, such firmness of character: men like that Victor Chapman,
who died to rescue American and French co-aviators nearly overcome by a
more numerous enemy, and whose father, so justly admired for his gifts
of mind and heart, decided that his son’s remains should be buried
where he had fallen: ‘Let him rest with his comrades’; or that Richard
Hall, killed by a shell while on the search for our wounded and whose
mother hesitated to accept a permit to visit his flower-wreathed tomb
at the front, because French mothers are not allowed to do so; or that
Harvard graduate, the poet of the Legion, Alan Seeger, who felt that
his hour could not be far remote and in expectation of it had written
from the blood-soaked battlefield where he had fought for Liberty.
The Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion beside which
any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned to make life
worth while seem pale in comparison. It is a privilege to march at his
side—so much so that nothing the world could give could make me wish
myself anywhere else than where I am.”
And Emory Pottle, in telling for the _Century_ the story of a
“Christmas at Pont-à-Mousson” (1915) when he and his fellows of
the American Ambulance Service in that sector had a “bonne fête,”
superintended by Mme. Marion and pretty little thirteen-year-old
Jeanne, says:
“It was a gay meal, recklessly, happily so. No one in the sector to
which we were attached was wounded that day. That, maybe, was the real
holiday note. Though it may seem incredible, the meal ended with a huge
plum pudding.
“It ended, too, with something very grave and as I now think of it,
very beautiful. The festival meal and the gifts were forgotten in the
face of it. For it was, oh! not strangely, one of those events which
lift men, if ever so briefly, out of their daily selves into unseen
things. Our chief of Section was called to the telephone. He came
back—we all saw it—with saddened face. ‘Fellows,’ he said slowly,
‘Richard Hall of Section III has been killed, blown off his car by a
stray shell in the Vosges. He is the first of us all to go.’
“We stood very silently and soberly about the table. Such news drove
home abruptly, cruelly by reason of our Christmas gaieties—just
what being there involved to us, to those who loved us. Very often
we had jested and joked about death. None of us was a coward, I
think; but—Hall dead—the first of the lot of us—dead—so far from
home—Christmas!
“‘Boys, let’s drink to him, the first of us to lay down his life for
France. Here’s to Dick Hall, good old scout!’
“So we drank, and I think no man there that night, where danger and
death were always brooding darkly, failed to feel the dignity and honor
of his calling.