“The gold star! The black—the veil! What a face of tragedy!” Such things they said; more than once a man’s hand crept to his hat, and he stood bareheaded as she passed, as before the dead. But she who had lived for three years facing an unthinkable word drifted through the crowd unconscious, uncaring.
A newspaper had printed a composite photograph of twenty-nine young soldiers, one from each of the combat divisions in France, and at breakfast in the hotel a woman whom she had never seen stepped across and laid it, the picture folded out, by her plate.
“It’s your boy, too,” the woman spoke gently, and was gone.
Dick’s mother stared at the vague, lovely face of an uncommonly handsome lad, dreamy, deep-eyed, steady-mouthed, a face rather short from brow to chin, with a wide facial arch between the cheek-bones—such as was Dick’s face. The sweet extreme of youth was like Dick, but a certain haunting, ethereal quality was not like him; yet, even so might her boy look at her through the veil of another world. There was in fact a manner of likeness, and to the woman whose soul was at white heat the likeness was the voice of Heaven saying “Amen” to her possessing thought. Yet this was not the sign. She would know that when it came. This was but an incident, making sure faith surer.
All the steps of his journey home she had watched Dick—the Unknown. When the papers had told how Sergeant Younger, over there in France at Châlons-sur-Marne, on October 24th, would be sent into a room of the city hall alone, to choose one of four nameless dead boys lying, each so helpless to plead his cause, in four earth-stained coffins, she had known well, even then, which one. Over Dick’s quiet heart the Sergeant would lay the white roses. The French town decked with the colors of the Allies; troops about the city hall; an American flag at half-mast; an unseen band playing on muffled trumpets—all this while the Sergeant walked slowly through the still room where the dead boys waited, and walked slowly back and turned and went to the farthest on the right. Dick. He bent and laid down the white French roses—over Dick. She was sorry about the other boys, yet Dick meant all of them. It was ordered. Dick was the Peace Bringer. She read how the inscription carried the words: “An Unknown American who gave his life in the World War.” She smiled a little to think how she alone in the world knew the Unknown; how among more than two thousand unidentified soldiers buried on the battlefields where they fell, chosen by chance so that even the field where he had fallen might never be placed—she smiled to think how through this mist of circumstance she knew Dick. The woman was mad, it might have been said, had any one known her full thought; who among us, with imagination, but hides a small corner of madness from the world?
Flower-heaped, carrying the cross of the Legion of Honor, moving like the mightiest king through weeping throngs, Dick came to the gray old cruiser Olympia, where Dewey had once said: “You may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready.” And they carried him on board, and a General was his escort home, and a guard of his comrades stood about him day and night as he slept among the flags, his faded French roses above his breast. The cruiser had steamed out from Havre through dipped flags and firing guns, and all the way across the Atlantic she was saluted by all ships large and small which sailed within vision. Because she carried Dick. With that it was November 9th and a raw, foggy, rainy day, but the woman went out from city noises, in the wet, where it was quiet, to listen for something. After a while she heard it—a far boom of guns—salutes to the Olympia as she came slowly up the Potomac. The fog hid her, but fort after fort, post after post, took up the tale and thundered its solemn welcome to the nation’s dead boy. The boy’s mother was at the Navy Yard when the ship swung into dock. She saw the crew, standing high up, in dark-blue lines, stiff, at attention; astern, under the muzzle of a gun that had rung into history that May morning in Manila Bay, was an awning; beneath it something flag-draped—Dick. The woman shook in a tearless sob. Dick. What was it all—all the glory that the nations, that America could heap on him, when—ah, Dick! She seemed to see his eyes and the deep look in them as he turned by the tulip-bed and kissed his hands to her—as the Cloudless Sulphurs stormed up from the clover around his blond head. Dick! Her little, laughing Dick—her big, loving Dick. Then she was aware of a gun crashing, a band playing a dirge—the gun crashing again into the music; it was the “minute-guns of sorrow” they were firing. And then suddenly—a shrill sound and a heart-stirring—as they lifted the coffin to the gangway, the boatswain, in the old ceremony of the sea, “piped his comrade over the side.” Step by slow step they carried the lad down and the boatswain’s whistle called piercingly again as Dick, high on the shoulders of eight uniformed men, reached shore. Dick was home. The coffin wound between the lines of troops and marines, toward the gun-carriage, and the rigid young bluejackets far above watched still at attention, and with that a bugler blew flourishes and the band broke into the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the nation’s hymn. And still the minute-guns crashed through. And packed thousands of plain American citizens waited bareheaded for hours in the cold rain to see this beloved boy of America carried by.
Many people remarked the slender, tall woman in her billowy black veil with the gold star on her arm. Some spoke of her. “A wonderful face,” they said, and: “Her eyes are burning her up.” And more than one thought: “Who knows? It may be her boy.”
After that she stood hour after hour in a shadowy doorway of a large chamber and watched a marvellous procession file past, four abreast. Hour after hour. Without ceasing they came; it was as if the country poured itself out in one draft of love. Sometimes a group halted and there was a short ceremony. She saw the President place the silver shield with its forty-eight gold stars; she saw the Boy Scouts, fresh-faced, sturdy lads such as Dick had been five or six years ago, form and recite their oath by Dick’s coffin; she saw the embassies of England, of France, and Italy bring wreaths for Dick; she saw the ancient Indian fighters, led by General Miles, and the Belgians with their palm, and the old man of ninety-one who wore his old Victoria Cross, and Pershing, laying down his wreath and stepping back to salute his soldier, and the Chinese and the Japanese with their antique bowing, and the white-turbaned Hindus, and ever and ever the plain Americans in their thousands, “his own people from every nook of the nation, who gave him his reward.”
The short gray day faded and night came and still the crowds poured, and Dick’s mother stood, still, unconscious of fatigue, and saw, as in a dream, the pageant, till the last ones allowed to come in had passed out and the swaying woman in black went also, and the boy was alone with his guard of five comrades, “his head eastward toward France and at his feet the twinkling lights of Washington.” Far above him on the great dome of the Capitol the brooding figure of Freedom, his comrade also, watched.
Shortly after daylight next morning the tramp of marching men and clatter of hoofs and grinding of wheels before the Capitol told that the greatest parade of American history was forming, and the khaki tide rolled into ordered ranks. The woman saw this beginning, very early in the morning. She was there before the bugle sounded attention across the plaza and the cavalrymen snapped out their sabres and the infantrymen came to present and the officers to salute and the colors were dipped—and the sun sent a beam to Freedom on the dome and another to a casket moving through the doorway. She saw it carried down the long steps by the bravest of the brave, all decorated men, and placed on the black-draped caisson with its black horses, and its soldiers sat on their scarlet saddle-cloths. She saw that, and she saw the President and “Black Jack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the A. E. F., following as chief mourners—Pershing wearing, of all his decorations, only the Victory Medal to which every American soldier has a right—the caisson where lay—Dick. She saw the crowds dense up Pennsylvania Avenue, the historic road “where the tramping ghosts of Grant’s legions marked a course.” She saw the silent, attentive thousands who packed the sidewalks, standing there to take their part in what was theirs, the glory of the American people. “Out in the broad avenue was a simple soldier, dead for the honor of the flag. In France he had died as Americans have always been ready to die, for the flag and what it meant.” The woman saw the massed, reverent faces, and read this in them.