In the original version of the tale the peddler was Yiddish. But I'm certain now that he was German and that he went back to the Vaterland after the war broke out and became the commander of a battery of five-inch guns on the old Luneville front.
On the day before Decoration Day of this year of 1917 I was in a sea-port town on the northeastern coast of France which our people had taken over as a supply base. The general in command of our local forces said to me as we sat in his headquarters at dinner that evening; “I wish you'd get up early in the morning and go for a little ride with me out to the cemetery. You'll be going back there later in the day, of course, for the services but I want you to see something that you probably won't be able to see after nine or ten o'clock.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Never mind now,” he answered. “To tell you in advance doesn't suit my purposes. But will you be ready to go with me in my car at seven o'clock?”
“Yes, sir. I will.”
I should say? it was about half-past seven when we rode in at the gates of the cemetery and made for the section which, by consent of the French, had been set apart as a burial place for our people. For considerably more than a year now, dating from the time I write this down, a good many thousands of Americans have been stationed in or near this port, and many, many times that number have passed through it. So quite naturally, though it is hundreds of miles from any of the past or present battle fronts, we have had numerous deaths there from accident or from disease or from other causes.
We rounded a turn in the winding road and there before us stretched the graves of our dead boys, soldiers and sailors, marines and members of labor battalions; whites and blacks and yellow men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics, Protestants and Mohammedans—for there were four followers of the faith of Islam taking their last sleep here in this consecrated ground—row upon row of them, each marked, except in the case of the Mohammedans, by a plain white cross bearing in black letters the name, the age, the rank and the date of death of him who slept there at the foot of the cross.
Just beyond the topmost line of crosses stood the temporary wooden platform dressed with bunting and flags, where an American admiral and an American brigadier, a group of French officers headed by a major-general, a distinguished French civic official, and three chaplains representing three creeds were to unite at noon in an hour of devotion and tribute to the memories of these three-hundred-and-odd men of ours who had made the greatest of all human sacrifices.
But it was not the sight of the rows of graves and the lines of crosses nor the peculiar devices uprearing slantwise at head and foot of the graves of the four Musselmans nor yet the brave play of tri-coloured bunting upon the sides and front of the platform yonder which caught my attention. For at that hour the whole place was alive with the shapes of French people—mostly of women in black but with a fair sprinkling of shapes of old men and of children among them. All these figures were busy at a certain task—and that task was the decorating of the graves of Americans.