Another Silhouette of Silence. It was after midnight on the Toul line. We were driving back from the front. The earth was covered with a blanket of snow. Everything was white. We were moving cautiously because with the snow over everything it was hard to tell where the icy road left off and the ditches began; and those ditches were four feet deep, and a big truck is hard to get out of a hole. Then there were no lights, for we were too near the Boche batteries.
"Halt!" rang out suddenly in the night, and a sentry stepped into the middle of the road.
I got down to see what he wanted.
"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches to-night, and they are coming this way. Drive carefully, for it is slippery."
In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and passed it. A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded down with American boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front of the truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks. One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers passed us. One can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise, but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word, not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty trucks. The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the snow. We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a snow-covered hill and disappear. Not a single sound of a human voice had broken the silence.
Another Silhouette of Silence: It is an operating-room in an evacuation hospital. The boy was brought in last night. An operation was immediately imperative. I had known the boy, and was there by courtesy of the major in charge of the hospital. The boy had asked that I come.
For just one hour they worked, two skilled American surgeons, whose names, if I were to mention them, would be recognized as two of America's greatest specialists. France has many of them who have given up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to endure danger to save our boys. During that hour's stress and strain, with sweat pouring from their brows, they worked. Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, who seemed to understand without words, and a motion of a hand, but not three words were spoken. It made a Silhouette of Silence that saved a boy's life.
The next scene is a listening-post. Two men are stretched on their stomachs in the brown grass. A little hole, just enough to conceal their bodies, has been dug there. The upturned roots of an old tree that a bursting shell had desecrated was just in front. "Tap! Tap! Tap!" came the sounds of Boches at work somewhere near and underground. It is needless to say that this was a Silhouette of Silence, and that a certain Y. M. C. A. secretary was glad when it was all over and he got back where he belonged.
