"_THEY SHALL NOT PASS_"
GLIMPSES OF THE SPIRIT OF THE TRENCHES
We were seated together at a Liberty-Loan dinner in Buffalo. He was in
the British uniform and "wore" a cane, not a dress cane, but a heavy
stick that took the place of a crutch. A naturalized American citizen,
he enlisted first in an Irish regiment. After recovering from a serious
wound he was discharged, but a few weeks in New York left him a
restless man with eyes turning ever toward the sea. On the thirtieth of
November, 1916, he re-enlisted, this time with a Canadian regiment in
Toronto. Again he was "shot to pieces." Now he hobbles about with the
same nervous eagerness that forced him away from home the second time.
Another honorable discharge has not satisfied him, and he said to me,
"I hope I get over this so that I can re-enlist, this time under the
Stars and Stripes."
No _man_ who has been "over there" is ever again satisfied while water
remains between him and the front. Not that he forms an appetite for
war; he hates war. But so long as the fighters fight he will be in the
valley of discontent when he is not on the field of action.
In England and in Scotland I found scores of men pining for France.
They had been eager to get back to "Blighty." With straining eyes they
had watched for her shores through the mists of the morning as the
hospital ship found the channel of the home port, but now they begged
for a chance to get back. Lieutenant-Colonel Cote, on his way to rejoin
in Italy his command which he had left on the Somme when a bullet
through his shoulder and back laid him low, said to me:
"I could not stay. They offered me a desk in London, and it was tough
to leave the wife and little girls; but I couldn't stay."
At that time he was one of six men in the British Empire who had three
times received the "D. S. O." (Distinguished Service Order)--once in
South Africa where he enlisted as a private, and twice in France. After
five months he was sufficiently recovered from his third wound to
report for duty.
What is this spirit, the spirit of the trenches? There is humor in
it. Lieutenant Johrens, who returned with me from France, was on the
Tuscania when she was sent down by submarine attack. As the destroyer
which picked up the boat company of which he was in charge cruised
about in the darkness near the scene of the catastrophe, the officers
heard singing in the distance. Searching out the spot from which
the voices came, they found twenty privates on a catamaran, shouting
lustily the refrain of the popular song,
"Where do we go from here, boys?
Where do we go from here?"
The Lieutenant added that a French pastor in Tours on being told the
story seemed deeply impressed, but not even slightly amused. The
next Sunday, referring to the incident, he said impressively to his
sympathetic congregation:
"Our brave allies are not only men of action; they are all men of deep
spiritual conviction. In danger their thoughts turn instinctively
toward God. As they clung to their frail raft in the darkness of the
tempest and the blackness of the night, they searched their hearts, and
with the mingled emotions of men facing the vast unknown they sang that
glorious old Billy Sunday hymn,
'Where do we go from here, boys?
Where do we go from here?'"
The humor of homesickness makes no pretence, and is unashamed. A chap
from Montana came up to the canteen counter behind which I stood, and
said,
"Say, did you ever hear the story of the Statue of Liberty?" and I
replied,
"Which one?"
He tipped his helmet forward, mocked me with a deep bow, and said,
"This one: A fellow had been started toward Davy Jones's locker three
times by 'subs.' Finally he got a tub that made through connections;
and, as he came up the harbor of 'little ol' Broadway,' he saw the
'Lady' standing up there and looking out through the mist, holding the
lamp up to the window for him, and saying, 'Hello, kid; welcome home!'
and he swallowed his Adam's apple, stood at attention, saluted, and
said, 'Thank you, madam; I'm mighty glad to see you. But, if you ever
see me again, _you'll have to turn around_!'"
He didn't wait for a laugh. He knew that the tale had "whiskers" and
that many a man now old "had kicked the slats out of his cradle" in
protesting against its resurrection. He hadn't told it to amuse me, but
to "spill himself." But I laughed just the same, for it was richly done.
I watched the artist of the story as he proceeded to unlimber "Jenny,"
the fifteen-dollar talking-machine that stood in the far corner of the
cellar in which this particular Y. M. C. A. canteen was located. No
corner of that cellar was as far as thirty feet from any other corner.
It was not more than sixteen hundred yards from our most advanced
position, and directly in front of a great battery which just then was
exchanging "calls" with the enemy. It sounded like a dozen Fourth of
Julys outside, with cannon crackers and bombs not excluded.
The story-teller fingered through the records until he found the one
his mood called for; then he removed his helmet to ease his weary
head,--regulations allowed him to uncover while underground,--sat down
on a biscuit-box directly in front of the sound-chamber, and, with his
unshaven chin in his dirty, cracked hand, waited, close up, for the
first word. There, in that old cellar under a ruined French chateau,
I heard Alma Gluck sing "Little Gray Home in the West." She has sung
it to vast multitudes in great halls, and to distinguished people in
quiet parlors; she has set the world a-weeping with the exquisite pain
of her song; but she never sang more effectively than she sang that
night among the noisome odors of a dark dugout of the front line, with
shrapnel and high explosives for an accompaniment and a homesick lad
from Montana for her audience.
What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of rare
comradeship. _I never saw a man injure another man up there, or seek
to._ Quarrels? _Sure!_ and personal encounters now and then, but these
are few and far between. There are little time and strength for them,
of course, and there are few opportunities; but, when they do happen,
they are differences of words that do not have two meanings and of
fists that come through the open.
I have seen a man carry, in addition to his own kit, the entire
equipment of another man who was suffering from gas. Three miles
and a half, under the severest conditions of opening spring, through
mud-filled trenches he walked with his double load, helping a man he
had never seen before.
In one of our companies were two Portuguese. One could not speak
English. He was terribly dependent upon his "buddy." While I was with
the battalion to which his company belonged, the "buddy" was killed.
The distress of the man who did not understand the language of the
country he loved and for whose just cause he had volunteered his all
was most affecting. But how the other men of that company got about
him! They swore that he should not have a single lonely minute. Indeed,
they nearly ruined the chap with their kindness. They were in a fair
way to destroy his stomach with their gifts and his constitution by
their vigilance, which actually robbed him of sleep, when a wise-headed
corporal took command of the situation and set them right.
It is this spirit of man's thoughtfulness for his brother, man's
tenderness with man, that reassures me when I ask, "How will this
stupendous man-hunt affect the heart of the race?" And the fighter is
not unaware of the question. Indeed, he asks it himself. I heard a
young major who was saying a farewell to a group of his friends at a
church banquet in a Canadian city say,
"I go away determined, God helping me, to do my hardest duty; to render
my country and the empire an enthusiastic and utmost service; and to
carry myself so that when I come back, if I come back, _little children
will run to me as confidently as they do now_."
What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of service that
has no interrogation points. One night a shriek of agony came ringing
back to our line from a listening-post in No Man's Land. A chaplain
was "up," a Roman Catholic. He crawled down the shallow communicating
trench to the wounded soldier, found him with a foot smashed by a
grenade, unconscious, and bleeding to death. He stanched the flow of
blood as best he could, and somehow got the man back. And then, after
the stretcher party had carried the "casualty" to the dressing-station,
and while they waited for the ambulance, he prayed with the lad. A few
days later he said to me, "I didn't think a Catholic's prayer would
hurt a Protestant boy." And it was a Protestant padre, we are told, who
ministered to the dying Major Redmond on a battle-field of Flanders.
There is no "grousing" in the trenches. I heard no complaints from men
who were straining their vital forces to the utmost. It is great to
hear them when they come out, though! How they do vent their spleen
upon springs that are a bit uneven, these fellows who have been
wallowing in mud and ice for days without a word in their misery!
A runner came in one morning after thirty-six hours of continuous duty.
He was chilled to the bone, and one foot was in bad shape. He had
neither overcoat nor blankets; his entire equipment had been buried
by the shelling incident to a raid. We leaned him against the great
tea-boiler, and while he stood there warming his body we poured hot
drinks into his stomach. Turning away for a moment, I was startled by
a clatter behind me. There he was, his cup on the floor; he was dead
asleep on his feet.
I have seen lads fall asleep on the rough boards of a Y. M. C. A.
hut, with only the nondescript materials for covers that we could
hastily throw over them. Not even the noises of great batteries, and of
hundreds of soldiers passing in and out, disturbed them in the least.
Not a whimper, not a whisper of rebellion, came from them. Oh, I do not
believe that I shall ever again complain about any hardship without
despising myself. What a task we at home have, to be worthy of them!
There are so many tales of unalloyed courage, and so many to tell them
well, that I have purposely committed this chapter largely to a very
faulty pen-picture of another side of the spiritual portrait of the
American soldier. His bravery is very prompt and very honest, and no
soldier of the world is braver. He confesses his fear, which is not
pretended; tells how fast he ran, how paralyzed his tongue was, how he
caught himself saying, "Engine, engine number nine, running on Chicago
line," or wiping his forehead with his revolver! But all the time he
has not turned away from the line of duty by a single hair.
The type of his courage is unmistakable. It would be very poor form
for an American to speak of this in any way that would make invidious
comparisons, and to speak thus would insult the American soldier, who
so thoroughly appreciates and so enthusiastically magnifies at his own
expense the prowess of our allies who have done so much for us, who for
four years have stood between us and destruction, and who even now must
very largely teach us the modern art of national self-defence. "Private
Peat" was of course over-enthusiastic in his praise, but he indicated a
quality of bravery that I never failed to find in the American army in
France when he said: "They are far ahead of the English and French in
many ways. They are more active, more quick in thinking, and can decide
in an instant what to do in battle. They have already made a wonderful
record. Every allied soldier honors them." I saw the native genius of
American fliers strikingly illustrated in an aviation contest between
student fliers and their instructors. Every event--bomb-dropping,
handling of machine guns, and trick flying--was won by the students.
And the spirit of the trenches is not confined to those who stand in
the mud of the trenches and experience their horrors. In Basingstoke,
England, one night I sat with a queenly woman of seventy in front of a
typical English grate fire. The war has taken much away from her; and,
as she talked with such quiet determination and in tones so rich with
suffering, she said, "_We_ who have been in the trenches for nearly
four years ----"
Ah, yes, the women too have been in the farthest places of the line.
The long vigils of the soldier in nights that promise only terror and
in days that bring only hardship are not kept alone. The mothers of
men, their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts stand there
too. And not only these, but the fathers and the brothers denied the
privilege of bearing arms, but entering into the supreme ordeals of
those who do bear them, by day and by night, in tense silence suffer
in spirit the agonies which the bodies of their sons and brothers must
experience at every station of the flaming trail that leads from the
base to the far rim of No Man's Land.
In a city of Scotland one night I was introduced by the "provost," the
mayor. He was quiet, but fully master of the situation. At the close of
the meeting my host told me that the chairman who had presented me had
that afternoon received a message informing him of the death in action
of his third and last son. _The provost was in the trenches that night._
I have watched the long hospital trains pull into London stations
during a "big push." I have seen the crowded ambulances dash by, and
the dense crowds lining the streets. I have caught at the tightening
of my throat when some grievously wounded man has waved a hand, or
smiled, or wriggled a foot (if the arm was helpless) at the shouting
multitude. And no less glorious has been the spirit of news-laddies who
in rags and tatters have pressed their papers upon bandaged Tommies who
were able to sit up--laddies from the submerged East Side, pauperizing
themselves for a week because their hearts called them. And no less
glorious than the spirit of these newsies has been the devotion of
the flower-women, just as poor as the boys in "Cæsar's coin" and just
as rich in true devotion, some of them in black with only memories
to fill the chairs where strong men once sat--flower-women who, with
tears in their eyes that for the soldiers' sake they _will not_ shed,
crowd about those wagons of mercy, showering the blanketed figures with
primroses and daisies.
What is this spirit,--this spirit of laughter and of tears; this spirit
that _goes_ and that _stays_; this spirit that slays without becoming
cruel and that turns, as the needle turns toward the pole, back again
toward hardness and danger, choosing to walk the trench of death rather
than to linger in the paths of life; this spirit that is both old and
young, and that flourishes in the thin soil of poverty as luxuriantly
as it blooms in the fields of the rich?
It is the spirit that I found in the Gillespie home in Edinburgh. When
the war came, there were two sons to add strength to the grace that two
daughters brought to that fireside. Now the line runs out to the valley
of the Somme, and ends there beneath the flowers of Flanders. Tom died
in the rear-guard fighting from Mons to the Marne. Bey fell at the head
of his men in a charge on the twenty-fifth of September, 1915. Tom's
oars (he was captain of the Oxford eight) hang in the hall and his
picture at the left of the mantel in the library. Bey, whose letters
to his mother have been published as "Letters from Flanders," was the
finest scholar turned out by Oxford in a generation. His picture hangs
just across the mantel from that of his brother.
In that room we sat and discussed the mighty advance just then at its
height; the possibility of its reaching the Channel ports, capturing
Paris, overrunning France, separating the British and French armies. We
discussed the _worst_! And then they said, they who had laid so rich an
offering upon the altar of liberty:
"Back against the shores of this island the British fleet will stand
and hold, hold while America brings up the reserves of civilization.
_They shall not pass! They shall not pass!_"
What is this spirit? I found it everywhere. The very stones of France
cried out with its voices; the shattered trees of the forest were the
strings of a harp that sang with it; the eyes of the smallest child
were filled with it; and aged men in the fields, and gray-haired women
pushing carts through the streets of the cities, were monuments to it
that cathedral-levelling shells could not destroy.
As a troop-train pulled out of a great station in Paris late one
afternoon, I saw a sight that will always remain with me as one of
the most appealing and suggestive pictures of this war. Perhaps five
hundred people were standing on the platform, saying a last good-by to
their loved ones and friends bound for the hungry front. With hands
outreaching and faces in the sun they stood in a great tableau of
farewell as we drew slowly away. And as I looked into the profound
depths of those faces, I was swept by a torrent of emotion that left
me a changed man. They, and millions of others they represent, are the
fathers and mothers, the sisters, wives, sweethearts, brothers, and
friends of unnumbered and never-to-return young men. All have felt
the agony of this war's separations and loss, have poured out their
treasure and their blood. We cannot speak for them, we who only now
begin to enter into their suffering. But we can speak for ourselves; we
can deliver our own souls.
We too have been in this war since 1914, but until a few months
ago France and Britain fought our battles for us. As surely as the
principles for which we now fight, and our American ideals and
liberties, were governing facts with us four years ago, so surely the
same misgoverned power that threatens them now threatened them then.
The British fleet in the North Sea, the British Tommy in the trenches
of Flanders, and the soldiers of France, have made the wall of iron
and the dike of flesh and bone against the flood of autocracy and
absolutism that otherwise would have broken through to ingulf Europe,
America, and the world.
The United States is forever in the debt of those who for unspeakable
months held the lines against the day of her arrival. What we do,
and all that we can do, will not be an unmerited investment from the
standpoint of those peoples who, war-weary and impoverished, yet hold
fast. As for ourselves, it is the price of our progress and of our very
life.
He is less than a loyal American and he is without the knowledge of
gratitude who speaks with a slight of the allies of his country. The
broken men in London's streets, the cripples by the Seine, the armless
lads who wear the badge of far-away Australia, the bandaged ones from
New Zealand and the maimed from Canada, leave me blinded with my tears
of pride and acknowledgment. The wide-eyed women of Brittany in their
simple black, and the children so strangely quiet, the matrons of
England, Italy, Ireland, and Wales, and their sisters in the Highlands
and Lowlands of Scotland, whose unshed tears are like lost rivers, tell
me of my debt, America's debt.
And let us not forget the plight of Serbia and Montenegro, the complete
agony of Roumania. If our war is just and if Justice never forgets,
then the United States will not remain a nation long enough to lose
from her memory the travail of these hapless people to whom all is
now lost but honor. And nothing that Russia, Russia betrayed by those
of her own household and destroyed by an unscrupulous enemy--nothing
that Russia does now or fails to do hereafter will wipe from the page
of history the imperishable glory of her _six million sons_ dead or
maimed, who, inadequately equipped and hopelessly led, were fed in
Freedom's name to the ruthless god of war.
To-day Democracy has become as one nation; thus she stands or falls.
The far-bending line behind Mt. Kemmel and in front of Amiens, and
every line that shall confront Imperial Germany until autocracy has
been finally conquered, is _our_ line. It is not four thousand miles
away, and there is no ocean between it and us. It runs through the
_heart_ of the United States and of Canada. Those who hold it with
their backs against the wall of destiny, whether they fight beneath
the Union Jack, the tricolor of France, or the Stars and Stripes, are
soldiers of the Republic.
This spirit of gratitude and understanding is the spirit of the
American trenches, for in them are Americans who have entered into the
sufferings of a world that loves liberty enough to give the best, the
last, and all, to preserve it. I found no boasting in our trenches;
men did not say, "We have come to win the war." They said with an
all-convincing earnestness, "We have come to _help win the war_." And
now _behind our_ trenches are fathers and mothers and friends; these
too have entered into this vast fellowship of pain, and they too _begin
to know_.
More eloquently than any words of mine can describe it the verses of
Private William I. Grundish, Company C of the U. S. Engineers, A. E.
F.,--verses which first appeared in the Paris edition of _The New York
Herald_,--have given a voice to the soul of the American soldier.
Private Grundish called the poem
FACING THE SHADOWS.
"When I behold the tense and tragic night
Shrouding the earth in vague, symbolic gloom,
And when I think that ere my fancy's flight
Has reached the portals of the inner room
Where knightly ghosts, guarding the secret ark
Of brave romance, through me shall sing again,
Death may ingulf me in eternal dark,--
Still I have no regret nor poignant pain.
Better in one ecstatic, epic day
To strike a blow for Glory and for Truth,
With ardent, singing heart to toss away
In Freedom's holy cause my eager youth,
Than bear, as weary years pass one by one,
The knowledge of a sacred task undone."
Lieutenant Dinsmore Ely was killed in France in the aviation service on
April 21, 1918. On April 29 his father, Dr. James O. Ely of Winnetka,
Ill., received a letter from him written just before his death. The
letter ends thus:
"And I want to say in closing, If anything should happen to me, let's
have no mourning in spirit or in dress. Like a Liberty Bond, it is an
investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country. It is an honor
to a family, and is that the time for weeping?"
"_It is an investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country._"
Here is the spirit of the trenches: it is the spirit that cries, "With
this I give myself." It is _sacrifice_, and sacrifice is the spirit of
victory.