A Modern Battle Scene
GREAT LITTLE RIVERS
By Frazier Hunt
The armies of the world were contending on the battlefields of France in a death struggle, known in history as the World War. It was a mighty clash of ideas and ideals. Frazier Hunt, a war correspondent and journalist, selected the Little Rivers of France as a subject to carry his theme: that little things sometimes set apart great differences, and that littleness and greatness are not matters of physical size.
For miles along the hard white road that had helped
save France a tiny river ran. But it was such a quiet
race with life and time. It had no steep banks; only gentle,
green, silent slopes that fell gracefully back from its edges.
Here and there fragrant woods wandered almost to its 5
drowsy waters.
A cuckoo sounded its call, and far off its mate sent
back the echo. On sun-splashed mornings the thrush
came, and in the moonlight the nightingale sang to
this little stream. 10
It was a tiny river, and if in great America, only the
countryside that knew its winding ways could have told
its name. It was a brook for poets to dream by. Little
islands of willows, weeping for France, slept in its heart.
One could almost whisper across it, and as a French schoolgirl 15
of fourteen wrote, "Birds could fly over it with one
sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were
millions of men, the one turned towards the other, eye to
eye. But the distance which separated them was greater
than the stars in the sky; it was the distance which separates
right from injustice."