Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others

by Alfred Noyes

MAY MARGARET

"Clerk Sanders and May Margaret
Walked ower yon garden green,
And sad and heavy was the love
That fell thae twa between."

May Margaret was an American girl, married to a lieutenant in the British Army named Brian Davidson. When the regretful telegram from the War Office, announcing his death in action, was delivered to her in her London apartment, she read it without a quiver, crumpled it up, threw it into the fire, and leaned her head against her arm, under his photograph on the mantel-piece. When her heart began to beat again, she went to her bedroom and locked the door. This was not the Anglo-American love-affair of fiction. Both of them were poverty-stricken in the estimation of their friends; and it was only by having her black evening dress "done over," and practising other strict economies for a whole year, that May Margaret had been able to sail from New York to work in an European hospital. The marriage had taken place a little more than three months ago, while Davidson was home on a few days' leave.

After the announcement of his death, she did not emerge from her room until the usual letter arrived from the front, explaining with the usual helplessness of the brother officer, that Davidson was really "one of the best," that "everybody liked him," and that "he was the life and soul of his company." But the letter contained one thing that she was not expecting, an official photograph of the grave, a quarter-plate picture of an oblong of loose earth, marked with a little cross made, apparently, of two sticks of kindling wood. And it was this that had brought her back to life again. It was so strangely matter-of-fact, so small, so complete, that it brought her out of the great dark spaces of her grief. It reminded her of something that Davidson had once written in a letter from the trenches. "Things out here are not nearly so bad as people at home imagine. At home, one pictures the war as a great blaze of horror. Out here, things become more sharply defined, as the lights of a city open up when you approach them, or as the Milky Way splits itself up into points of light under the telescope. I have never seen a dead body yet that looked more imposing than a suit of old clothes. The real man was somewhere else."

She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply defined official photograph.

There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate, even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being.

May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the Chicago Bulletin.

"I want to speak to Mr. Harvey," she said. "Is this Mr. Harvey? This is Mrs. Davidson,—Margaret Grant—you remember, don't you? I want to see you about something very important. You are sending people out to the front all the time, aren't you, in connection with your newspapers? Well, I want to know if you can arrange for me to go.... Yes, as a woman correspondent.... Oh, they don't allow it? Not at the British front?... Well, I've got to arrange it somehow.... Won't you come and see me and talk it over?... All right, at six-thirty. Good-by."

The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K. Harvey, of the Chicago Bulletin, was announced. He was a very young man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose.

"So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might manage the French front, I think."

"But I want particularly to go to Arras. Surely, you can manage it, Mr. Harvey. You must know all sorts of influential people here." Her voice, with its husky contralto notes, rather like those of a boy whose voice has lately broken, had always an appeal for Mr. Harvey, and it was particularly pleasing just then. He beamed through his glasses and ran his hand through his curly hair.

"I was talking to Sir William Robertson about a very similar proposition only yesterday, and Sir William told me that he'd do anything on earth for the Chicago Bulletin, but the War Office, which is in heaven, had decided finally to allow no women correspondents at the British front."

May Margaret rose and went to the window. For a moment she pressed her brow against the cool glass and, as she stared hopelessly at the busses rumbling by, an idea came to her. She wondered that she had not thought of it before.

"Come here, Mr. Harvey," she said. "I want to show you something."

He joined her at the window. A bus had halted by the opposite pavement. The conductor was swinging lightly down by the hand-rail, a very youthful looking conductor, in breeches and leggings.

"Is that a man or a woman?" said May Margaret.

"A woman, isn't it?"

"And that?" She pointed to another figure striding by in blue overalls and a slouch hat.

"I don't know. There are so many of them about now, that on general principles, I guess it's a woman. Besides, it looks as if it would be in the army if it were not a woman."

"Yes, but I am an American correspondent," said May Margaret.

"Gee!" said Mr. Harvey, surveying her from head to foot. His face looked as if all the printing presses of the Chicago Bulletin were silently at work behind it. She was tall and lean—a college friend had described her exactly as "half goddess and half gawk." Her face was of the open-air type. Her hair would have to be cropped, of course. "Gee!" he said again. "It would be the biggest scoop of the war."

A fortnight later, a slender youth in khaki-colored clothes, with leggings, arrived at the Foreign Office, presented a paper to a sad-eyed messenger in the great hall, and was led to the disreputable old lift which, as usual, bore a notice to the effect that it was not working to-day. The sad-eyed messenger heaved the usual sigh, and led the way up three flights of broad stone stairs to a very dark waiting-room. There were three other young men in the room, but it was almost impossible to see their faces.

"Mr. Grant, of the Tribune, wasn't it, sir?" said the messenger.

"Mr. Martin Grant, of the Chicago Bulletin," said May Margaret, and the messenger shuffled into the distance along a gloomy corridor which seemed to be older than any tomb of the Pharaohs, and destined to last as long again.

In a few minutes, a young Englishman, who looked like an army officer in mufti, but was really a clerk in the Foreign Office, named Julian Sinclair, was making himself very charming to the four correspondents. To one of them he talked very fluently in Spanish: to another he spoke excellent Swedish, bridging several moments of misunderstanding with smiles and gestures that would have done credit to a Macchiavelli; to the third, because he was a Greek, he spoke French; and to Martin Grant, because he was an American, he spoke the language of George Washington, and behaved as if he were a fellow-countryman of slightly different, possibly more broad-minded, but certainly erroneous politics.

Then he gave them all a few simple directions. He was going to have the pleasure of escorting them to the front. It was necessary that they should be accompanied by some one from the Foreign Office, he explained, in order to save them trouble; and they had been asked to meet him there to-day for purposes of identification and to get their passports. These would have to be stamped by both the British and French military authorities at an address which he gave them, and they would please meet him at Charing Cross Station at twelve o'clock to-morrow morning. It was all very simple, and Mr. Martin Grant felt greatly relieved.

There was a drizzle of rain the next morning, for which May Margaret was grateful. It was a good excuse for appearing at the station in the Burberry raincoat, which gave her not only a respite from self-consciousness, but an almost military air. Her cloth cap, too, the peak of which filled her strong young face with masculine shadows, approximated to the military shape. It was a wise choice; for the soft slouch hat, which she had tried at first, had persistently assumed a feminine aspect, an almost absurdly picturesque effect, no matter how she twisted it or pulled it down on her close-cropped head.

She was the first of the party to arrive, and when Julian Sinclair hurried along the platform with the three foreign correspondents, there was no time left for conversation before they were locked in their compartment of the military train. They were the only civilians aboard.

She dropped into a corner seat with her newspaper. But her eyes and brain were busy with the scene outside. The train was crammed with troops, just as it had been on that other day when she stood outside on the platform, like those other women there, and said good-by to Brian. She was living it all over again, as she watched those farewells; but she felt nearer to him now, as if she were seeing things from his own side, almost as if she had broken through the barriers and taken some dream-train to the next world, in order to follow him.

There was a very young soldier leaning from the window of the next compartment. He was talking to a girl with a baby in her arms. Her wide eyes were fixed on his face with the same solemn expression as those of the child, dark innocent eyes with the haunted beauty of a Madonna. They were trying to say something to each other, but the moment had made them strangers, and they could not find the words.

"You'll write," she said faintly.

He nodded and smiled airily. A whistle blew. There was a banging of doors, and a roar of cheering. The little mother moved impulsively forward, climbed on to the footboard, threw her right arm around the neck of her soldier, and drew his face down to her own.

"Stand back there," bellowed the porters. But the girl's arm was locked round the lad's neck as if she were drowning, and they took no notice. The train began to move. A crippled soldier, in blue hospital uniform and red tie, hobbled forward on his crutch, and took hold of the girl.

"Break away," he said gruffly. "Break away, lass."

He pulled her back to the platform. Then he hobbled forward with the moving train and spoke to the young soldier.

"If you meet the blighter wot gave me this," he said, pointing to his amputated thigh, "you give 'im 'ell for me!"

It was a primitive appeal, but the boy pulled himself together immediately, as the veteran face, so deeply plowed with suffering, savagely confronted his own. And, as the train moved on, and the wounded man stood there, upright on his crutch, May Margaret saw that there were tears in those fierce eyes—eyes so much older than their years—and a tenderness in the coarse face that brought her heart into her throat.

The journey to Folkestone was all a dream, a dream that she was glad to be dreaming, because she was now on the other side of the barrier that separated people at home from those at the front. The queerest thoughts passed through her mind. She understood for a moment the poor groping endeavors of the war-bereft to break through those darker barriers of the material world, and get into touch, no matter how vaguely, with the world beyond. She felt that in some strange way she was succeeding.

They had lunch on the train. She forced herself to drink some black coffee, and nibble at some tepid mutton. She was vaguely conscious that the correspondents were enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of the State, and she shuddered at the grotesque sense of humor which she discovered amongst her thoughts at this moment.

The Channel-crossing on the troop-ship brought her nearer yet. There was hardly standing-room on any of the decks, and the spectacle was a very strange one, for all the crowded ranks in khaki, officers and men, had been ordered to wear life-belts. A hospital ship which had just arrived was delivering its loads of wounded men to the docks, and these also were wearing life-belts.

The sunset-light was fading as the troop-ship moved out, and the seas had that peculiar iridescent smoothness, as of a delicately tinted skin of very faintly burning oils, which they so often wear when the wind falls at evening. On one side of the ship a destroyer was plowing through white mounds of foam; and overhead there was one of the new silver-skinned scouting air-ships.

Away to the east, a great line of transports was returning home with the wounded, and the horizon was one long stream of black smoke. It was all so peaceful that the life-belts seemed an anomaly, and it was difficult to realize the full meaning of this traffic. The white cliffs of England wore a spiritual aspect that only the hour and its grave significance could lend them; and May Margaret thought that England had never looked so beautiful. There were other troop-ships all crowded, about to follow, and their cheers came faintly across the water. The throb of the engines carried May Margaret's ship away rhythmically, and somewhere on the lower deck a mouth organ began playing, almost inaudibly, "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." The troops were humming the tune, too softly for it to be called singing, and it all blended with the swish of the water and the hum of the engine-room, like a memory of other voices, lost in France and Flanders. May Margaret looked down at the faces. They, too, were grave and beautiful with evening light; and the brave unquestioning simplicity of it all seemed to her an inexpressibly noble thing. She thought for a moment that no pipes among the mists of glen or mountain, no instrument on earth, ever had the beauty of that faint music. It was one of those unheard melodies that are better than any heard. The sea bore the burden. The winds breathed it in undertone; and its message was one of a peace that she could not understand. Perhaps, under and above all the tragedies of the hour, the kingdom of heaven was there.

The cliffs became ghostly in the distance, and suddenly on the dusky waters astern there shone a great misty star. It was the first flash of the shore searchlights, and May Margaret watched it flashing long after the English coast had disappeared. Then she lost the searchlight also; and the transport was left, with the dark destroyer, to find its way, through whatever perils there might be, to the French coast. Millions of men—she had read it—had been transported, despite mines and submarines, without the loss of a single life. She had often wondered how it was possible. Now she saw the answer.

A little black ship loomed up ahead of them and flashed a signal to their escort. Far through the dusk she saw them, little black trawlers and drifters, Lizzie and Maggie and Betsy Jane, signaling all that human courage could discover, of friend or foe, on the face of the waters or under them.

In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor, amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and waved his hand to Julian Sinclair.

"Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his neutrals with a fellow-countryman.

There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant, where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain and death somewhere in that darkness.

Every few minutes they passed troops of dark marching men. Several times it seemed to her that she recognized the face for which she was looking, in some momentary glimmer of starlight.

At last they reached the village where the guests of G. H. Q. were to be quartered. The foreigners were assigned to the château which was used as a guest-house; but there had been one or two unexpected arrivals, and Captain Crump asked the American correspondent if he would mind occupying a room in the house of the curé, a hundred yards away up the village street. The American correspondent was exceedingly glad to do so, and was soon engaged in attempts at conversation with the friendly old man in the black cassock who did his best to make her welcome. There were no more difficulties for her that night, except that the curé had very limited notions as to the amount of water she required for washing.

They set out early the next morning on their way to that part of the front which she had particularly asked to see. The long straight poplar-bordered road, bright with friendly sunshine now, absorbed her. She heard the chatter of the correspondents at her side as in a dream.

"Have you read Anatole France?" said the Spaniard. (He was anxious for improving conversation, and wore a velvet coat totally unsuited to the expedition.) But May Margaret's every thought was plodding along with the plodding streams of dusty, footsore men, in steel hats, and she did not answer. She pointed vaguely to the women working in the fields to save the harvest, and the anti-aircraft guns that watched the sky from behind the sheaves. At every turn she saw something that reminded her of things she had seen before, in some previous existence, when she had lived in the life of her lover and traveled through it all with his own eyes. She was passing through his existence again. He was part of all this: these camps by the roadside, where soldiers, brown as gipsies, rambled about with buckets; these endless processions of motor-lorries, with men and munitions and guns all streaming to the north on every road, as if whole nations were setting out on a pilgrimage and taking their possessions with them; these endless processions of closed ambulances returning, marked with the Red Cross.

Once, over a bare brown stretch of open country, a magnificent body of Indian cavalry swept towards them, every man sitting his horse like a prince; and the British officers, with their sun-burned faces and dusky turbans, hardly distinguishable from their native troops.

"Glorious, aren't they?" said Sinclair, leaning back from his place beside the chauffeur. "But they haven't had a chance yet. If only we could get the Boches out of their burrows and loose our cavalry at them!"

She nodded her head; but her thoughts were elsewhere. This picturesque display seemed to belong to a bygone age; it was quite unrelated to this war of chemists and spectacled old men who disbelieved in chivalry, laughed at right and wrong, and had killed the happiness of the entire world.

She noticed, whenever they passed a village or a farm-house, or even a cattle-shed now, that the smell of iodoform brooded over everything. All these wounded acres of France were breathing it out like the scent of some strange new summer blossoms. A hundred yards away from the ruined outhouses of every village she began to breathe it. Her senses were unusually keen, but it dominated the summer air so poignantly that she could not understand why these meticulously vivid men—the foreign correspondents—were unaware of it. It turned the whole countryside into a series of hospital wards; and the Greek was now disputing with the Spaniard about home-rule for Ireland.

At last, in the distance, they heard a new sound that enlarged the horizon as when one approaches the sea. It was the mutter of the guns, a deep many-toned thunder, rolling up and dying away, but without a single break, incessant as the sound of the Atlantic in storm.

The cars halted in what had once been a village, and was now a rubbish heap of splinters and scarred walls and crumbling mortar.

The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns deepened as they went.

"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see. It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."

The burial-ground lay close under a ridge of hills, and they approached it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses, rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a single shell.

They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "Mort pour la France." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish correspondent greatly.

"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a wooden cross that bore the words:

"In loving memory of Jim,
From his old pal,
The artful dodger,
'Gone but not forgotten.'"

"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain Crump?"

Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.

"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.

The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the identification disc.

"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary—that black thing—round the cross."

"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.

"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from the body."

"No, he was not a Catholic," whispered May Margaret. She felt as if she must drop on her knees and call on the mute earth to speak, to explain, to tell her who lay beneath.

"There must be a mistake," she said at last, and her own voice rang in her ears like the voice of a stranger. "I must find out. How can I find out?"

Her face was bloodless as she confronted Captain Crump.

"There's some terrible mistake," she said again. "I can't face his people at home till I find out. He may be—" But that awful word of hope died on her lips.

"I'll do my best," said Captain Crump. "It's very odd, certainly; but I shouldn't—er—hope for too much. You see, if he were living, they wouldn't have been likely to overlook it. It's possible that he may be there, or there." He pointed to two graves without a name. "Or again, he may be missing, of course, or a prisoner. His lot are down at Arras now. We'll get into touch with them to-morrow and I'll make inquiries. You want to pass a night in the trenches, don't you? I think it can be arranged for you to go to that section to-morrow night. Then we can kill two birds with one stone."

May Margaret thanked him. Behind them, she heard, with that strange sense of double meanings which the most commonplace accidents of life can awake at certain moments—the voice of one of the correspondents, still arguing with the others. "Here, if you like, is Shakespeare," he said:

"How should I your true love know
From another one."

The quotation, lilted inanely as a nursery rime, pierced her heart like a flight of silver arrows.

"You have not a very pleasant business," the correspondent continued, addressing a soldier at work in an open grave.

"I've 'ad two years in the trenches, sir, and I'm glad to get it," he replied.

"Little Christian crosses, planted against the heathen, creeping nearer and nearer to the Rhine," murmured Julian Sinclair, on the other side of May Margaret.

The multiplicity of the ways in which it seemed possible for both soldiers and civilians to regard the war was beginning to rob her of the power to think.

On their way back, through the dusk, they passed a body of men marching to the trenches, with a song that she had heard Brian humming:

"Fat Fritz went out, all camouflaged, like a beautiful bumble-bee,
With daffodil stripes and 'airy legs to see what he could see,
By the light of the moon, in No Man's Land, he climbed an apple tree
And he put on his big round spectacles, to look for gay Paree.

But I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and months, and months;
But I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and month, and months;
For Archie is only a third class shot,
But he brought him down at once,

AND

I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and months, and months."

Soon afterwards, with all these themes interchanging in her bewildered mind, May Margaret heard Julian Sinclair calling through the dark from the car ahead: "Take a good look at the next village; it's called Crécy." The stars that watched the ancient bowmen had nothing new to tell her; but a few minutes later, as another body of troops came tramping through the dark to another stanza of their song, there seemed to be an ancient and unconquerable mass of marching harmonies within the lilt of the Cockney ballad; like the mass of the sea behind the breaking wave:

"'E called 'em the Old Contemptibles,
But 'e only did it once,
And I don't suppose 'e'll do it again,
For months, and months, and months."

They dined at the château, and she slipped away early to the house of the curé. Before she slept, she took out Brian's last letter and read it. She sat on the narrow bed, under the little black crucifix with the ivory Christ looking down at her from the bare wall. She was glad that it was there; for it embodied the master-thought of that day's pilgrimage. Never before had she realized how that symbol was dominating this war; how it was repeated and repeated over thousands of acres of young men's graves; and with what a new significance the wayside crosses of France were now stretching out their arms in the night of disaster.

In Brian's letter there was very little about himself. He had always been somewhat impatient of the "lyrical people," as he called them, who were "so eloquently introspective" about the war, and he had carried his prejudice even into his correspondence. She was reading his letter again to-night because she remembered that it expressed something of her own bewilderment at the multiplicity of ways in which people were talking and thinking of the international tragedy. "I have heard," he wrote, "every possible kind of opinion out here, with the exception of one. I have never heard any one suggest any possible end for this war but the defeat of the Hun. But I have heard, over and over again, ridicule of the idea that this war is going to end war, or even make the world better.

"Along with that, I've often heard praise of the very militaristic system that we are trying so hard to abolish altogether. Of course, this is only among certain sets of men. But this war has become a war of ideas; and ideas are not always contained or divided by the lines of trenches. We are fighting things out amongst ourselves, in all the belligerent countries, and the most crying need of the Allies to-day is a leader who can crystallize their own truest thoughts and ideals for them.

"You know what my dream was, always, in the days when I was trying my prentice hand in literature. I wanted to help in the greatest work of modern times—the task of bringing your country and mine together. Our common language (and that implies so much more than people realize) is the greatest political factor in the modern world; and, thank God, it's beyond the reach of the politicians. In England, we exaggerate the importance of the mere politician. We do not realize the supreme glory of our own inheritance; or even the practical aspects of it; the practical value of the fact that every city and town and village over the whole of your continent paid homage to Shakespeare during the tercentenary. Carlyle was right when he compared that part of our inheritance with the Indian Empire. It is in our literature that we can meet and read each other's hearts and minds, and that has been our greatest asset during the war. Think what it will mean when two hundred million people, thirty years hence, in North America, are reading that literature and sharing it. Shelley understood it. You remember what he says in the 'Revolt of Islam.' The Germans understand, that's why they're so anxious to introduce compulsory German into your schools and colleges. But our own reactionaries are afraid to understand it.

"After all, this war is only a continuation of the Revolutionary war, when the Englishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence fought an army of hired Germans, directed by Germans. Even their military maps were drawn up in German. It's the same war, and the same cause, and I believe that the New World eventually will come into it. Then we shall have a real leadership. The scheming reactionaries in Europe will fail to keep us apart. We shall yet see our flags united. And then despite all the sneers of the little folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall be able to suppress barbarism in Europe and say (as you and I have said): Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder.

"There seems to be an epidemic of verse among the armies. I haven't caught it very badly yet; but these were some of my symptoms in a spare moment last week:

"How few are they that voyage through the night,
On that eternal quest,
For that strange light beyond our light,
That rest beyond our rest.

And they who, seeking beauty, once descry
Her face, to most unknown;
Thenceforth like changelings from the sky
Must walk their road alone.

So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood;
But now, before these eyes,
From those foul trenches, black with blood,
What radiant legions rise.

And loveliness over the wounded earth awakes
Like wild-flowers in the Spring.
Out of the mortal chrysalis breaks
Immortal wing on wing.

They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light,
Through realms beyond our ken.
The loneliest soul is companied to-night
By hosts of unknown men."