1. Military Cemetery at Romagne.
2. Bearing the Cross.
For weeks at Romagne we watched these men fare forth with the dawn to find the dead on the 480 square miles of battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne. At eventide we would see them return and reverently remove the boxes from the long lines of trucks and place them on the hillside beside the waiting trenches that other soldiers had been digging all the long busy day. Far into the night we would sit in our darkened tent looking out on the electric-lighted cemetery, watching the men as they lowered the boxes into the trenches. Sometimes we could hear only a low murmur of voices, and sometimes again there would come to us a plaintive melody in keeping with the night hour and its peculiar task.
Mr. William G. Shepherd, in the New York Evening Post, gives the following picture:
“As we moved about the battlefield later, we saw in fields, in groves, on hillsides, and even in the yards of what had been the houses of French villages, groups of Negro soldiers at their worthy but infinitely slow task of calling the roll of our American dead and gathering them together at the hillside rendezvous of Romagne.
“One of the burning pictures of all this war to me was a view of these Negro sexton-soldiers working on a hilltop one rainy evening at dusk. They were outlined against the gloomy sky. Their huge motor-truck stood near by, ready to carry their burden to Romagne. I thought of the home back in the United States where this one doughboy’s empty chair held its sacred place; of how the ‘home fires,’ of which our doughboys had so often sung, had been kept burning for him. I thought of how the heart-love in that home would flash across the Atlantic to this bleak French hilltop faster than any wireless message—if the homefolk only knew.
“It was good to know that he was being taken from his solitary bed, in the midst of the battlefield’s desolation, back to the crowd of his buddies at Romagne. This, that I saw on the sky-line, was his second mobilization. Not this time will he sing and romp and play and joke and fight; after his second mobilization at Romagne he will just lie still and rest with all the other thousands of his fellow soldiers, his job well done, until it is time for us he saved to take him back home.”
We have yet another picture. It was the day before the 30th of May, 1919. Every soldier was helping to put the Romagne cemetery in readiness for its dedication by General Pershing on the next day. Looking out from our little kitchen window of the Y barrack, we saw what seemed to us a wonderful sight. Two long lines of soldiers were before us—one moving slowly over the hill and the other coming up the main road—each man bearing on his shoulder a single white cross that would rest above the grave of a fellow-hero. Quickly our mind traveled back over the centuries to Him who had borne the cross toward Golgotha, and we saw in these dark-skinned sons of America bearing those white crosses, something of the same humility and something of the same sorrow that characterized the Master, but we also beheld in them the Christ spirit grown large, beautiful and eternal with the ages. Behind the vivid picture drawn by Mr. Shepherd and behind this other picture, one sees not only the twenty-two thousand homes represented by these crosses at Romagne, but the ten thousand real Americans, colored men of the Pioneer Infantries and labor battalions, who, through the sweat of toil, linked that place of sainted pilgrimage on the Western Front with those American homes.
Our outstanding impression of those faithful ones who wore the insignia of Alsace-Lorraine is their strict allegiance to the trust imposed upon them, with heart and purpose fixed to pay the price entailed in the completion of their severe task.
Whether they sought their comrades by the winding Meuse or on the battle-seamed heights of “No Man’s Land;” whether they found their bodies in the shadows of the ruined cathedrals of Rheims, Soissons or Ypres, always they were making an unconscious challenge to the very heart of the United States for the rights of the twelve millions of its citizens whose loyalty had thus endured the test.