For weeks at Romagne we watched these men fare forth with the dawn
to find the dead on the 480 square miles of battlefield of the
Meuse-Argonne. At eventide we would see them return and reverently
remove the boxes from the long lines of trucks and place them on the
hillside beside the waiting trenches that other soldiers had been
digging all the long busy day. Far into the night we would sit in our
darkened tent looking out on the electric-lighted cemetery, watching
the men as they lowered the boxes into the trenches. Sometimes we could
hear only a low murmur of voices, and sometimes again there would
come to us a plaintive melody in keeping with the night hour and its
peculiar task.
Mr. William G. Shepherd, in the New York _Evening Post_, gives the
following picture:
“As we moved about the battlefield later, we saw in fields, in
groves, on hillsides, and even in the yards of what had been the
houses of French villages, groups of Negro soldiers at their worthy
but infinitely slow task of calling the roll of our American dead and
gathering them together at the hillside rendezvous of Romagne.
“One of the burning pictures of all this war to me was a view of
these Negro sexton-soldiers working on a hilltop one rainy evening
at dusk. They were outlined against the gloomy sky. Their huge
motor-truck stood near by, ready to carry their burden to Romagne.
I thought of the home back in the United States where this one
doughboy’s empty chair held its sacred place; of how the ‘home
fires,’ of which our doughboys had so often sung, had been kept
burning for him. I thought of how the heart-love in that home would
flash across the Atlantic to this bleak French hilltop faster than
any wireless message—if the homefolk only knew.
“It was good to know that he was being taken from his solitary bed,
in the midst of the battlefield’s desolation, back to the crowd of
his buddies at Romagne. This, that I saw on the sky-line, was his
second mobilization. Not this time will he sing and romp and play and
joke and fight; after his second mobilization at Romagne he will
just lie still and rest with all the other thousands of his fellow
soldiers, his job well done, until it is time for us he saved to take
him back home.”
We have yet another picture. It was the day before the 30th of May,
1919. Every soldier was helping to put the Romagne cemetery in
readiness for its dedication by General Pershing on the next day.
Looking out from our little kitchen window of the Y barrack, we saw
what seemed to us a wonderful sight. Two long lines of soldiers were
before us—one moving slowly over the hill and the other coming up the
main road—each man bearing on his shoulder a single white cross that
would rest above the grave of a fellow-hero. Quickly our mind traveled
back over the centuries to Him who had borne the cross toward Golgotha,
and we saw in these dark-skinned sons of America bearing those white
crosses, something of the same humility and something of the same
sorrow that characterized the Master, but we also beheld in them the
Christ spirit grown large, beautiful and eternal with the ages. Behind
the vivid picture drawn by Mr. Shepherd and behind this other picture,
one sees not only the twenty-two thousand homes represented by these
crosses at Romagne, but the ten thousand _real_ Americans, colored men
of the Pioneer Infantries and labor battalions, who, through the sweat
of toil, linked that place of sainted pilgrimage on the Western Front
with those American homes.
Our outstanding impression of those faithful ones who wore the insignia
of Alsace-Lorraine is their strict allegiance to the trust imposed upon
them, with heart and purpose fixed to pay the price entailed in the
completion of their severe task.
Whether they sought their comrades by the winding Meuse or on the
battle-seamed heights of “No Man’s Land;” whether they found their
bodies in the shadows of the ruined cathedrals of Rheims, Soissons or
Ypres, always they were making an unconscious challenge to the very
heart of the United States for the rights of the twelve millions of its
citizens whose loyalty had thus endured the test.
May we not hope that as the heart of this homeland finds its way to
those American shrines in France, a real peace, born of knowledge and
gratitude, shall descend upon us, blotting out hate and its train
of social and civil injustices? Then shall we realize the value and
meaning of the pain and sacrifice of these dark-browned heroes of ours.
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What are the things that make life bright?
A star gleam in the night.
What hearts us for the coming fray?
The dawn tints of the day.
What helps to speed the weary mile?
A brother’s friendly smile.
What turns to gold the evening gray?
A flower beside the way.