Brother was a good swimmer and he managed to rescue his chum and to get him back on the raft. But while he was in the water two more men, half drowned and desperate, had climbed aboard, and the raft was now several inches under seas. So this heroic young American soldier, unwilling to jeopardize his comrades’ life, gave up his own.
“Tell my mother and the family that I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to fight for America,” he said, and sank into the black and icy ocean.
“Well, I can fight,” said the soldier who read me that letter. “And every time I am allowed to go over the top I shall remember how they killed my kid brother in the dark.”
American men are accustomed from their childhood to see women treated with respect and children with tenderness. They see with horror-stricken eyes the women and children refugees from the war invaded districts flying before a foe that knows no pity, that treats combatant and non-combatant with equal cruelty and wrath.
I have told of a Sunday I spent in a railroad station in the first days of the great spring offensive, and of the southward bound trains bearing the wounded and the homeless. With me on that platform were several American soldiers, two or three members of the military police. They were there primarily to look after our soldiers passing up and down the line, but they worked hard to help the stricken refugees, hundreds of whom were fed and ministered to that day by the French Red Cross.
They were mostly women and children and old men, and their plight was pitiful. This was the second time that they had fled before the German hordes. Last November, after the “victorious retreat,” they had crept back to their ruined and desolated villages and farms, and with the aid of their government and the American societies for French reconstruction had begun life again.
In their shells of houses and in their shattered little farms they gladly took up the work of gaining a little bread. Then, without any warning, the awful flood of war swept over them again.
They fled, half clad, never pausing to collect their poor belongings. Without the blessed help of the Red Cross they would have died of starvation on the road. Everything they ever had was gone. They stumbled off the trains, dazed, with white blank faces and staring empty eyes.
I saw those American soldiers carrying old women and little children into the Red Cross canteen, feeding them, ministering to them, all the time muttering curses on the fiends who had brought them to this bitter pass.
“Oh, we have work to do over here,” one of these men said to me. “God help the kaiser when we get fairly into this war.” And then he exclaimed: “Are there really any pacifists left in America? If there are I wish they could see what we have seen to-day.”