Then there is the starlight on No Man's Land, for the starlight is a
part of the lights o' war just as are the moonlight and the star-shells
and the little flash-lights and the range-finders and the bursting
shells and bombs. But there are other more significant lights o' war.
There is the "Light that Lies in the Soldiers' Eyes," of which my
friend Lynn Harold Hough has written so beautifully and
understandingly. Only over here it is a different light. It is the
light of a great loneliness for home, hidden back of a light that we
see in the eyes of the three soldiers in the painting "The Spirit of
Seventy-Six." It is there. It is here. One sees it in the eyes of
the lads who have come in out of the trenches after they have had their
baptism of fire. I have seen them come in after successfully repulsing
a German raid and I have seen their eyes fairly luminous with victory,
and that light says, as said the spirit of France, not only "They shall
not pass," but it says something else. It says: "We'll go get 'em!
We'll go get 'em!" That's the light o' war that lies in the soldiers'
eyes back of the light of home. I verily believe that the two are
close akin. The American lad knows that the sooner we lick the Hun the
sooner he'll get back home, where he wants to be more than he wants
anything else on earth.