A tiny American ambulance—a jitney—threads its way down from the Dead Man to ——, carrying a boy through whose breast a dum-dum bullet had torn its beastly way. Three hours before, the driver of that ambulance had talked with the boy who now lay behind him on a stretcher. Then the young Frenchman had been looking forward to the wondrous day when the war would end. He had planned to come to America to live, just as soon as he could get back to Paris and say good-bye to the mother from whom he had received a letter that very day.
"I will be lucky!" he had exclaimed to the American. "I will not be killed. I will not even be wounded. Ah, but won't I be glad when the war is over!"
But his life was slipping away, faster than the Red Cross car could carry him to aid. The checking station reached, two orderlies pulled the stretcher from the ambulance. There was a choking sound in the wounded soldier's throat and the driver, thinking to ease his breathing, lifted his head. The closed eyes fluttered open, the indescribable smile of the dying lighted his face and with his last faint breath he murmured those words that always still war momentarily—
"Ah, mere! Ma mere!"
"Oh, mother! My mother!"—and he was dead.
Just one little incident of war, just a single glimpse at the accomplishments of monarchial militarism.
That French boy has not come to America, but America has gone to him. He died for a flag that is red, white and blue—for the tricolor of France. And we have gone across the sea to place the stars of our flag with the bars of his. His fight was our fight and our fight is his. Together we fight against those who menace civilization in both old world and new. We fight against the army that outraged Belgium and devastated France, against the militaristic clique that sanctioned the slaughtering and crippling of little children, the maiming of women, against that order of militarists who decorated the commander of the submarine that sank the Lusitania with her babies and their mothers.
We are at war and we are Americans…. Enough.
Verne Marshall was the driver of that ambulance. Three months of his service were spent at Verdun.