Soldier silhouettes on our front

by William L. Stidger

Day is just breaking across the sea. It is a beautiful dawning. Five thousand American boys line the railings of a certain great transport. They are not allowed to smoke. They do not sing. They do not talk much. Some of them are sleepy, for the average American boy is not used to being awakened at two in the morning. They just stand and wait and watch through five hours of silence as the great ship plunges its way defiantly through the danger zone, saying in so many words: "We're ready for you!"

And the silhouette of that great ship, lined with khaki-clad American boys, waiting, watching, as seen from another transport, where the watcher who writes this story stands, is a sight never to be equalled in art or story. To see the huge bulk of a great transport just a stone's throw away, moving forward, without a sound from its rail-lined, soldier-packed deck, is one of the striking Silhouettes of Silence.

Thomas Carlyle once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history beside its Allies, the English and the French.

The news came. The first division of American troops was to leave overnight and march overland into the Marne line. Our Allies needed us. They had called. We were answering.

As a tribute to the efficiency of the American army, may I say that the one well-trained, seasoned division of troops that we had in a certain quiet sector picked up bag and baggage overnight and, like the Arabs, "silently stole away," and did it so well and so efficiently that not even the Y. M. C. A. secretaries, who had been living with this division intimately for months, knew that they were gone, and that a new division had taken its place, until the next morning. Talk about German efficiency—that phrase, "German efficiency," has become a bugaboo to frighten the world. American efficiency is just as great, if not greater.

I saw that division marching overland. It was a thrilling sight. Coming on it suddenly, and looking down upon its marching columns from the brow of a hill, and then riding past it in a Ford camionet all day long with Irving Cobb, riding past its ammunition-wagons, past its machine-gun battalion, past its great artillery company, past its hundreds of infantrymen, past its trucks, past its clean-cut officers astride their horses, past its supply-trains, past its flags and banners, past its kitchen-wagons, seeing it stop to eat, seeing it shoulder its rifles, seeing its ambulances and its Red Cross groups, seeing its khaki-clad American boys wind through the valleys and up the hills and over the bridges (the white stone bridge), through its villages, many in which American soldiers had never been seen before; welcomed by the people as the saviors of France, seeing its way strewn with the flowers of spring by little children, and with the welcome and the tears of French mothers and daughters clad in black, seeing it march along the French streams from early morning until late at night, this was a sight to stir the pride of any American to the point of reverence.

But all day as we rode along that winding trail I thought of the song that the soldiers are singing, "There's a Long, Long Trail Awinding to the Land of Our Dreams," and when I looked into the faces of those American boys I saw there the determination that the trail that they were taking was a trail that, although it was leading physically directly away from home, and toward Berlin, yet it was, to their way of thinking, the shortest way home. The trail that the American army took that day as it marched into the Marne line was the "home trail," and every boy marched that road with the determination that the sooner they got that hard job ahead over with, the sooner they would get home. I talked with many of them as they stopped to rest and found this sentiment on every lip.

But it was a silent army. I heard no singing all day long—not a song. Men may sing as they are marching into training-camps; they may sing when they board the boats for France now; they may sing as they march into rest-billets, but they were not singing that day as they marched into the great battle-line of Europe.

I heard no laughter. I heard no loud talking, I heard no singing; I heard only the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, and the crunching of the great motor-trucks, and the patter of horses as the officers galloped along their lines. That army of American men knew that the job on which they were entering was not child's play. They knew that democracy depended upon what they did in that line. They knew that many of them would never come back. They knew that at last the real thing was facing them. They were not like dumb, driven beasts. They were men. They were American men. They were thinking men. They were silent men. They were brave men.

They were marching to their place in history unafraid, and unflinching, but thoughtful and silent.