"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches
to-night, and they are coming this way. Drive carefully, for it is
slippery."
In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and
passed it. A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded
down with American boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front of the
truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks.
One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers passed us. One
can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise,
but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word,
not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty
trucks. The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night
was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the
snow. We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a
snow-covered hill and disappear. Not a single sound of a human voice
had broken the silence.
Another Silhouette of Silence: It is an operating-room in an evacuation
hospital. The boy was brought in last night. An operation was
immediately imperative. I had known the boy, and was there by courtesy
of the major in charge of the hospital. The boy had asked that I come.
For just one hour they worked, two skilled American surgeons, whose
names, if I were to mention them, would be recognized as two of
America's greatest specialists. France has many of them who have given
up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to endure danger to save our boys.
During that hour's stress and strain, with sweat pouring from their
brows, they worked. Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, who
seemed to understand without words, and a motion of a hand, but not
three words were spoken. It made a Silhouette of Silence that saved a
boy's life.
The next scene is a listening-post. Two men are stretched on their
stomachs in the brown grass. A little hole, just enough to conceal
their bodies, has been dug there. The upturned roots of an old tree
that a bursting shell had desecrated was just in front. "Tap! Tap!
Tap!" came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground.
It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a
certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got
back where he belonged.
[Illustration: The upturned roots of an old tree were just in front.]
The beautiful columns of the Madeleine bask under the moonlight. Paris
was never so quiet. The silence of eternity seemed to have settled
down over her. As one looked at the Madeleine under that magical white
moonlight he imagined that he had been transported back to Athens, and
that he was no longer living in modern times and in a world at war. It
was all so quiet and peaceful, with a great moon floating in the
skies----
But what is that awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with
a blow? It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war.
It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women
there are left comfortless in Europe. It is the siren. An air-raid is
on. The "alert" is sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The Boches
have gotten over even before the barrage is up. Hell breaks loose for
an hour. No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading
than the next hour. The barrage was the heaviest ever sent up over
Paris. The six Gothas that got over the city dropped twenty-four bombs.
The terrific bombardment, however, now as one looks back, only serves
to make the preceding silence stand out more emphatically, and the
Madeleine, basking in the moonlight the hour before, more beautiful in
its silhouette of grace and bulk against the golden light.
A month on the front lines with thunder beating always, a month of
machine-gun racket, a month of bombing by Gothas every night, a month
of crunching wheels, a month of pounding motors and rumbling trucks, a
month of marching men, a month of the pounding of horses' hoofs on the
hard roads of France, a month of sirens and clanging church-bells in
the _tocsin_, and then a day in the valley of vision, down at Domremy
where Jeanne d'Arc was born, was a contrast that gave a Silhouette of
Silence to me.
One day on the Toul line, a train by night, and the next morning so far
away that all you could hear was the singing of birds. Peasants
quietly tended their flocks. Children played in the roads. The valley
was beautiful under the sunlight of as warm and as beautiful a spring
day as ever fell over the fields of France. I stood on the very spot
where the peasant girl of Orleans caught her vision. I looked down
over the valley with "the green stream streaking through it," with
silence brooding over it, a bewildering contrast with the day and the
month that had just preceded; and it all stands out as one of the
Silhouettes of Silence.
Another day, another hour, another part of France. They call it
"Calvaire." It covers several acres. The peasants go there to worship
in pilgrimage every year. There is a Garden of Gethsemane, with
marvellous statues built life-size. Then through the woods there is a
worn pathway to the Sanhedrin. This is of marble. Jesus is here
before his accusers in marble statuary.
As his accusers question him and he answers them not, they wonder. But
those who have seen "Calvaire" in France do not wonder, for from that
room there is a clean swath of trees cut, and a quarter of a mile away
looms, on a hill, a real Calvary, with the tree crosses silhouetted
against the sky, and Jesus is seeing down the pathway the hill of the
cross.
Then there is "The Way of the Cross," built by peasant hands. It is a
road covered with flintstones as sharp as knives. This flint road must
be a mile long, and it winds here and there leading to Calvary, and
along its way are the various stations of the cross in life-size
figures. Jesus is seen at every step of this agony bearing his cross
until relieved by Simon. Over this flintstone every year the people
come by thousands, and crawl on their naked knees or walk on their
naked feet. Every stone is stained with blood; stumbling, cruelly
hurt, bleeding, they go "The Way of the Cross," and I have no doubt but
that they go back to their homes better men and women for having done
so.
The day that we went to "Calvaire" it was a fitful June afternoon. As
we walked along "The Way of the Cross," across the field, past the
living, almost breathing, statues of the Master bearing his cruel
cross, past the sneering figures of those who hated him, and past the
weeping figures of those who loved and would aid him, and as we came to
the hill itself, suddenly black clouds gathered behind it and rain
began to pour.
"I am glad the clouds are there back of Calvary. I am glad it is
raining as we climb the hill of Calvary. I am willing to be soaked.
It seems more fitting so, with the black clouds there and all. It
reminds me of 'The Return from Calvary' in the painting," one of the
party said impressively.
Up the winding hill we climbed, and there gaunt and cruel against a
sombre sky stood the three crosses, just as we have always imagined
them. The hill was so high that it overlooked as beautiful a valley as
I had seen in all France. It was in Brittany, as yet untouched by the
war as far as its fields are concerned (not so its men and its women
and its homes); but on that spring day as we looked down from the hill
of Calvary we could see off in the distance the tomb, with the stone
rolled away, and life-size angels standing there with uplifted wings.
Then farther along the road, perhaps another quarter mile away, on
another hill, were the figures of the disciples, and the women watching
the ascension with rapt faces, and a glory shone round about them all.
And as we stood there on that Calvary, built in memory of the
crucifixion and resurrection and ascension of their Master by the
peasants, and looked down over the earth, bright with crimson poppies
everywhere in field and hill, brilliant with the old-gold blossom of
the broom flower, as we stood there, our hearts subdued to awe and
wonder, looking down, suddenly the rain ceased and the sun shone in its
full glory and lighted anew the white marble of the figures of the
ascension far below us in the field.
As we stood there the thought came to me:
"So is the Christian world standing today on the hill of 'Calvaire.'
The storms have been black about the Christian world. The clouds have
seemed impenetrable. The earth has been desolate. We have walked on
our hands and knees and in our bare feet up the flinty road of
Baupaume, 'the saddest road in Christendom,' and along this road we
have borne the cross. We, the Christian world, the mothers, the
fathers, the little children, have bled. We have stumbled and fallen
along the way. And when we climbed the hill of Calvary, as we have
been doing for these years of war, the clouds darkened and we saw only
the ominous silhouettes of the three crosses.
"But the sun is now breaking the clouds, and it shall burn its way to a
glorious day. Across the fields we see the open tomb and the
resurrection is about to dawn; the day of brotherhood, democracy,
justice, love, and peace forever.
"Hope is in the world, hope brooding, hope dominant, hope triumphant,
hope in its supreme ascension."
One could not see this Silhouette of Silence, this "Calvaire" of the
French nation, and not come away knowing the full meaning of the war.
It is "The New Calvary" of the world.