ARMISTICE DAY
It was the Unknown Soldier Boy that put an end to the doubt, the
faultfinding, the cynicism that was in the air of Washington as the day
for the opening of the Conference approached. It all became vanity,
pettiness, beside that bier with its attending thousands of mourning
people.
They carried the body to the capitol where for a day it lay in state.
Busy with my attempts to learn something of what it was all about, it
was not until late in the afternoon that I thought of the ceremony on
the hill, and made my way there for my daily walk. It had been a soft,
sunny day, the air full of gray haze. Everything around the great
plaza—the Capitol, the library, the trees, the marble Senate and House
buildings right and left—was tender in its outline. There were no
crowds, but as I looked I saw massed four abreast from the entrance door
to the rotunda, down along terraces of steps, across the plaza as far as
I could see, a slowly moving black mass, kept in perfect line by
soldiers standing at intervals. I made my way across. Where was its end?
I went to find it.
I walked the width of the great plaza and turned down the Avenue. As far
as I could see the people were massed—one block, two blocks, three
blocks, four—and from every direction you could see men and women
hurrying to fall in line. I had had no idea of joining that line, of
passing through that rotunda. My only notion was to take a glimpse of
the crowd. But to have gone on, to have been no part of something which
came upon me as tremendous in its feeling and meaning, would have been a
withdrawal from my kind of which I think I should always have been
ashamed. And so I fell in.
The mass moved slowly, but very steadily. The one strongest impression
was of its quietness. Nobody talked. Nobody seemed to want to talk. If a
question was asked, the reply was low. We moved on block after
block—turned the corner—now we faced the Capitol—amazingly beautiful,
proud and strong in the dim light. I never had so deep a feeling that it
was something that belonged to me, guarded me, meant something to me,
than as I moved slowly with that great mass toward the bier. The
sentinels stood rigid, as solemn and as quiet as the people. The only
murmur that one heard was now and then a low singing, “Nearer My God to
Thee.” How it began, who suggested it, I do not know; but through all
that slow walk, the only thing that I heard was women’s voices, now
behind me, now before me, humming that air. It took a full
three-quarters of an hour to reach the door and pass into the rotunda.
It took strong self-control not to kneel by the bier. They told me that
there were women, bereft mothers, to whom the appeal was too
much—mothers of missing boys. This might have been hers. Could she pass?
The guards lifted them very gently, and in quiet the great crowd moved
forward. I fancy there were thousands that passed that place that day
that will have always before their eyes that great dim circle with bank
upon bank of flowers, from all over the earth—flowers from kings and
queens and governments, from great leaders of armies, from those who
labor, from the mothers of men, and hundreds upon hundreds from those
who went out with the dead but came back. The only sound that came to us
as we passed was the clear voice of a boy, one of a group, once
soldiers. They came with a wreath. They carried a flag. The leader was
saying his farewell to their buddy.
A hundred thousand or more men and women made this pilgrimage. A hundred
thousand and many more packed the streets of Washington the next day
when the bier was carried from the Capitol to the grave at Arlington.
The attending ceremony was one of the most perfect things of the kind
ever planned. It had the supreme merit of restraint. Every form of the
country’s service had a place—not too many—a few—but they were always of
the choicest—from the President of the United States down to the last
marine, the best we had were chosen to follow the unknown boy.
There was an immense sincerity to it all. They felt it—the vast,
inexpressible sorrow of the war. And no one felt it more than the
President of the United States. What he said at Arlington, what he was
to say the next day at the opening of the Conference, showed that with
all his heart and all his mind the man hated the thing that had brought
this sorrow to the country, and that he meant to do his part to put an
end to it.
The ceremony was for the dead sacrifice, but the feature of it which
went deepest to the heart and brought from the massed crowds their one
instinctive burst of sympathy and greeting was the passing, almost at
the end of the procession, of the War’s living sacrifice—Woodrow Wilson.
The people had stood in silence, reverently baring their heads as the
bier of the soldier passed, followed by all the official greatness of
the moment—the President of the United States, his cabinet, the Supreme
Court, the House, the Senate, Pershing, Foch. And then, quite
unexpectedly, a carriage came into view—two figures in it—a white-faced
man, a brave woman. Unconscious of what they were doing, the crowd broke
into a muffled murmur—“Wilson!” The cry flowed down the long avenue—a
surprised, spontaneous recognition. It was as if they said: “You—you of
all living men belong here. It was you who called the boy we are
honoring—you who put into his eye that wonderful light—the light that a
great French surgeon declared made him different as a soldier from the
boys of any other nation.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “whether it is God, the Monroe
Doctrine or President Wilson, but the American soldier has a light in
his eye that is not like anything that I have ever seen in men.” Woodrow
Wilson, under God, had put it there. His place was with the soldier. The
crowd knew it, and told him so by their unconscious outburst.
His carriage left the procession at the White House. Later the crowd
followed it. All the afternoon of Armistice Day men and women gathered
before his home. All told there were thousands of them. They waited,
hoping for his greeting. And when he gave it, briefly, they cheered and
cheered. But they did not go away. It was dark before that crowd had
dispersed.
But this expression of love and loyalty and interest in Woodrow Wilson
is no new thing in Washington. For months now, on Sundays and holidays,
men, women and children have been walking to his home, standing in
groups before it, speaking together in hushed tones as if something
solemn and ennobling stirred in them. Curiosity? No. Men chatter and
jibe and jostle in curiosity. These people are silent—gentle—orderly.
You will see them before the theater, too, when it is known that he is
within, quietly waiting for him to come out—one hundred, two hundred,
five hundred—even a thousand sometimes, it is said. They cheer him as he
passes—and there are chokes in their voices—and always tenderness. Let
it be known that he is in his seat in a theater, and the house will rise
in homage. Let his face be thrown on a screen, and it will receive a
greeting that the face of no other living American will receive. It
requires explanation.
The people at least recognized him as belonging to the Conference. And,
as a matter of fact, the Conference never was able to escape him. Again
and again, he appeared at the table. The noblest words that were said
were but echoes of what he had been saying through the long struggle.
The President’s great slogan—Less of armaments and none of war—was but
another way of putting the thing for which he had given all but his last
breath. The best they were to do—their limitation of armaments, their
substitute to make it possible, were but following in the path that he
had cut. The difficulties and hindrances which they were to meet and
which were to hamper both program and final settlements were but the
difficulties and hindrances which he had met and which hampered his work
at Paris. From the start to the finish of the Conference on the
Limitation of Armament, the onlooker recognized both the spirit and the
hand of Woodrow Wilson as the crowd recognized him on Armistice Day.
There was another figure in the memorial procession which deeply touched
the crowd and which stayed on, uninvited. She came with the dead soldier
boy. She stood by him night and day as he lay in state, followed him to
the grave in which they laid him away at Arlington, a symbol of the
nation’s grief over all its missing sons. She did not go with the
crowds. She took her place at the door of the Conference, and there, day
by day, her solemn voice was heard.
“I am the mother of men. Never before have I lifted my voice in your
councils. I have been silent because I trusted you. But to-day I speak
because I doubt you. I have the right to speak, for without me mankind
would end. I bear you with pain, such as you cannot know. I rear you
with sacrifice, such as you cannot understand. I am the world’s
perpetual soldier, facing death that life may be. I do not recoil from
my great task. God laid it on me. I have accepted it always. I give my
youth that the world may have sons, and I glory in my harvest.
“But I bear sons for fruitful lives of labor and peace and happiness.
And what have you done with my work? To-day I mourn the loss of more
than ten million dead, more than twenty million wounded, more than six
million imprisoned and missing. This is the fruit of what you call your
Great War.
“It is I who must face death to replace these dead and maimed boys. I
shall do it. But no longer shall I give them to you unquestioning as I
have in the past, for I have come to doubt you. You have told me that
you used my sons for your honor and my protection, but I have begun to
read your books, to listen to your deliberations, to study your
maneuvers; I have learned that it is not always your honor and my
protection that drives you to war. Again and again it is your own love
of glory, of power, of wealth; your hate and contempt for those that are
not of your race, your color, your point of view. You cannot longer have
my sons for such ends. I ask you to remold your souls, to make effective
that brotherhood of man of which you talk, to learn to work together,
white and black and brown and yellow, as becomes the sons of the same
mother.
“I shall never leave your councils again. My daughters shall sit beside
you voicing my command—you shall have done with war.”