Seicheprey is holy ground; lying midway between Toul and Metz, it is in the heart of the salient that next to Verdun has witnessed the bloodiest fighting on the French front. It is an honor and a high trust for an army just to be there. It stands before one of the two gateways to the heart of France. It has seen the tide of war surge back and forth many times among its houses and up and down its street. Again and again it has been captured and surrendered and recaptured.
Out from it, or hard by, twenty thousand glorious Frenchmen have been buried by the hands of their comrades or the shells of their foe. I have seen the war planes high above it, German planes with shrapnel bursts about them, hurrying home from observation-trips behind our lines, and the silver planes of France in hot pursuit. From a blackened hill behind it I saw an air duel above the German lines, and a German flyer brought down in smoke and flames. I have seen our wounded carried out from it, German wounded brought into it; and stumbling through its single street I have watched the passing of our first prisoners of war. From it I have watched the chill winds of February driving through the shredded orchard trees on the hillside that dips into the open field where the poison gas has found so many victims and where it lies in ambush in the noisome shell-holes. Beyond the field is what was once a forest; the shattered tree-trunks now remind one of the broken columns in a cemetery.
I have seen Seicheprey under a barrage. Crouching in an abandoned trench by the side of a runner from battalion headquarters, to which we were returning and scarce one hundred yards away, I witnessed through terror-widened eyes that most appalling sight of modern warfare. Once I looked down from the summit of the Canadian Rockies upon a cloudburst in the Bow River Valley. Once in Oregon among the dunes of the Columbia I turned my pony's head away from an approaching storm, and flung myself headlong upon my face while with the sound of a hundred mountain torrents and in inky darkness the swirling tempest of sand swept over me. But this was a cloudburst of steel, an avalanche of iron; the pouring upward of the earth in sudden geysers, choked with trees and rocks and the fragments of houses; a continuous, mighty thunder in which were mingled the throaty roar of multiple discharges, the moan of the shells through the air, and the shock of the explosions at contact with the objective. It was an overwhelming noise filling all spaces.
Seicheprey! It was then a jagged scar. It must be now, after this fresh surge of the human flood, an open wound. There I saw heaven touch hell. There I beheld the soldiers of my country writing a new page in the book of her glory.
Seicheprey taught me the sacredness of comradeship. From a parapet near by one early afternoon I looked across the intervening 170 yards to the German lines. The snow was falling. Strangely out of place in No Man's Land were scores of crosses marking the graves of French soldiers. When the crosses were placed there, they were behind the men who reared them, but after the final adjustment of the lines they were found between the hostile trenches. Peaceful and white was the battle graveyard. Now the men who made it and who tended it for so many weary months are gone. Soldiers in khaki fill the trenches behind it, and the dugouts echo the words of an unknown tongue; but in another springtime, when the flowers bloom redder because of their long, rich watering, in the dark night the hands of the stealthy American patrol will straighten the crosses as tenderly as would the hands that put them there.
Seicheprey! I found a French gas-mask out from Seicheprey. It has sacred ground upon it, the soil of France. And where the face of its wearer pressed into it there are blood-spots. During the raid on the first of March our allies came down from the right, and dropped in behind our lines at a distance of five hundred yards. There in the open they lay, a reserve against a possible breaking through of the enemy. The enemy did not break through; but there a few hours later, after the raiders had been hurled back, terribly punished, I found this mask. I shall keep it as a token of the unity of free peoples which in the providence of God and in His time will make the world safe for democracy.
I shall hope that in the great peace I may lead my children down the street of Seicheprey restored and tell of the glory that I saw there.