A Year Later
I
AN accomplished woman who had rendered great service with the Red Cross in France had come to talk with me about the joys and surprises of working with the men overseas. She had heard that I had once worked in the same château at Luzancy on the Marne to which she had gone months afterward.
It is always the same in one of these interviews: the talkers vie with each other only in seeing which has the richest instances to tell of kindly approaches, of beauties of action, of inexhaustible fun and unforgettable men, and by talking try to recapture a little of the joy of it all. But except for some such slight revival of the old satisfactions as a chance conversation might give, my friend was tacitly taking the ground that it was all over and must all slowly fade into the past. With the same fear myself, I had determined not to let it fade if I could help it, and for three months past had gone about whenever I could, just for the sheer joy of finding some of the men again. My journeys had taken me into five states, following all kinds of clues; and when I began to speak of doughboys as if they were still with us and one could still see as much as he would of the wounded, she seemed rather puzzled and asked, ‘ But why do you take all that trouble?’ She had too easily given in to the conventional idea that it was all over.
Spaced out all over the land as he is, the doughboy, the artilleryman, the ambulancier, the hospital and medical man, is just the same person that he was in France. He has brought home with him just what gladdened our souls over there. He will not say much about it while this strange vogue of silence is on; but anyone who wants it can have much of the old experience still.
If I were a millionnaire, — ‘which the reader will be pleased to have mentioned so early in the narrative,’ — I should go on one grand tour to find again the men I came to know on stretchers or in hospitals, or whom I met by chance on French roads for only a little space, but long enough for them to say or do something that gripped one’s heart forever. But the grand tour being impossible, I take the short ones, and turn aside whenever a détour will bring me within hail of them.
Never did I imagine that Pittsburgh and its environs could suddenly become endowed in my imagination with all the colors of romance; but this is what has come to pass; for out in that region live a great number of those who surprised me into the happiest days of my life. A week in Pittsburgh, with the privilege of looking up the doctors, the cook, the bell-hop, the bar-keep, the street-car conductor, the drug-clerk, the hostler, the automobile agent, the shoe-clerk, the miner, the student, the farmer, the drummer, the lawyer, and McCafferty of the pickle factory, quite casts Atlantic City and Mt. Desert into the shade. I knew nothing about Pennsylvania until Château-Thierry; but after the first two days there with Pennsylvanians, the whole state was glorified in my imagination forever.
I had sent him word that I was coming, and on arrival telephoned to some outlying village that I was there and at the hotel. The last time I had seen him I had admired the subtle skill with which he had always quietly managed, no matter how crowded the circle, to get one of the seats by the stove up there in the distant Auvergne mountains, where he was a patient after the action was all over. I remembered the day when I saw him off on the train for the coast. Any of them would gladly have taken train from the most comfortable spot in France, though it should carry them only twenty miles and land them in a swamp for a month, such was their glee at being that much nearer home. And now I heard my name paged in the great lobby, and, as I went forward to answer, there, following the bell-boy, was my little friend of the Auvergne.
Looking for the most comfortable place to talk I said, ‘Now, Alex, come over here and we’ll have a grand powwow.’
But catching me by the arm and blushing and laughing, he whispered to me, ‘Why, you know I can’t do that, chaplain; they won’t let me sit here in the lobby.’
‘And why not?’ I asked.
‘Why, Lord bless you, chaplain, did n’t you know? I ’m a page here myself and go on duty in an hour.’
But I stood on my rights as a guest; and besides, he looked a good deal better than anyone else in the lobby, and so we had the hour out together. He told me why he was a page, and his reasons seemed to me cogent as he told of his tips and his wife and baby. He was just as good as he was in France, yes, better, and I thought, ‘How can anybody who had known these men once ever surrender the chance to go on knowing them always?’ A little extra pains, a little car-fare, and the thing is done. Then he disappeared, and came smiling back in his page’s uniform; and so through the days he was always at hand — good as gold; and by reason of his calling, I saw more of him than would otherwise have been possible.
It had been one of the worst nights at Château-Thierry, and the back-wash of the wounded came in fast. There he sat — this one — bolstered up in bed, with both legs gone, and his face black with a hundred powder-stains, and his eyes closed. With what little energy he had left he said, —
‘There’s just one thing I want to ask you, chaplain, and that is whether you know anything about the science of artificial limbs?’
‘Yes, something.’
‘How far along has it got?’
‘Oh, a good way.’
‘ What do you think I can hope for — much?’
I told him I thought he could hope for a good deal, and so he stopped. I saw him at intervals through the two days, and then he was whisked away to some Base; but I was always haunted by that boy and wondered what the end might be.
On my return to the States, I found one day in one of the magazines a selection of the brighter kind of soldiers’ letters, and one of them was some doughboy’s breaking it gently and jocosely to his mother that he was coming home, ‘ but that there was not quite so much of him’; and at the end the name that was so sharply etched on my memory. At last I had struck the trail. Giving a guess as to which hospital he was likeliest to be in, I made for Colonia, to find that he belonged there but was on furlough for the day in another town; and there I found him.
Waiting in the parlor, I heard him stumping down the stairs, singing out, ‘I’ll get there after a while, give me time.’ So I went out into the hall to see him. There he was, young, smiling, well, and puzzled as to who I might be.
‘I guess I’ll have to think a bit,’ he said.
‘You were at Château-Thierry, were n’t you?’ I asked.
‘Well, I should rather think I was,’ he replied; and then, after a good long look he said, ‘By George, I wonder if you can be the Red Cross man who used to come to my bed when I was there? ’
I asked him what he thought of the ‘science of artificial limbs’ now, and he said it was all I had claimed for it and more. ‘I used to be six feet one, but they’ve taken me down two inches; can’t balance me at the old height, you see; but I can drive a car and swim and everything is going fine. But gee, chaplain, I was scared one of those times you came to my bed, because you had a book in your hand and I thought it was all up with me until I found you were going to use it for the chap in the next bed, to give him the communion. You know, I’ve always wondered what became of him; what did?’ The boy in the next bed was the Lawrenceville School boy, and he rests in ChâteauThierry. The other day I went to the train to meet my rediscovered friend and bring him home; and when he sat here across the table from me in my own house, and I thought of all that had happened before this circuit was complete, it seemed a sort of miracle. Columbia has him now, and I like to think that Château-Thierry did not end, but only began, the adventure of our friendship.
II
What I have lost through not keeping an address-book earlier, I cannot estimate. There are men who passed like ships in the night, but not without leaving a remembrance which makes you wish you but knew where they are. Sometimes you just remember a slight clue, and it was such that enabled me to find G— again. He was shot on outpost at Belleau Wood at midnight, but could not leave until, just as it was getting gray, he saw the Huns break out of the woods, and going to give the alarm, was hit by a piece of shell and lamed for life. I was at Base Hospital 2 in Paris during the ten days when they came in, and the day he came I encountered him. He was so difficult that I simply had to do what I could for him and then side-step him, until one night the head-nurse said to me, ‘Why don’t you go in to see G— oftener?’
‘ Because he is the only man in there who does n’t want to see me. I think he’s chaplain-shy.’
The nurse said she believed he did want to see me, thought he put that all on; and added that he was in there all alone now, and I ought to go in and try him again. The dusk was falling, and there he lay, alone in the room, one leg hoisted on one sling, one arm on another. He looked up at me in the same old scornful way as if I were dirt; but, drawing up a chair, I began to make conversation, and he let me make it — what was made. At last, being all talked out, without any response from him except monosyllables, I had got to the pass of Hosea Biglow where he says, ‘He staits his subjick ag’in; doos it back’ards, sideways, eendways, crisscross, bevellin’, noways.’ It was no use. Why had the nurse sent me in again when I was ready to let the poor boy alone?
At last, feeling like a ‘returned empty,’ I got up and said, ‘I think I’ll go
now, G—’; whereupon he turned his
head toward me, and looking daggers at me, snapped out, ‘Don’t go: stay!’
So with that I drew up my chair again and told him we might just as well have this out now as any time; that he was the only man in the room I could never get a word out of, and now, when I had come in to try it again, he acted as if he wished I’d go. ‘And when I start to go, you say, “ Don’t go: stay.” What does it all mean, G—? Let’s have it out.’
At that he grasped me by the hand, turned his head away, and burst into tears. ‘Yes,’he said, ‘that’s me all over. You ’re right. I was always that way: whenever I really want to know anyone I always act as if I did n’t.’
It was not very difficult after that. But overnight I was sent up on the Marne and never got back; and so I lost him, but never forgot him. I had made some mistake about the name of his home town in Massachusetts, and had to go to two towns that summer day to find him. At last I found his home close down by the shore, but the boy was still away in the Marine Hospital; so I journeyed to Chelsea, and had him called down to the guard-house. I watched him coming down the terraces, and on going up to meet him ran straight into the same old scornful look once more.
He did not know me, but I was determined that this time I would let him take his leisure about ‘coming to.’ I did not mind in the least going through the Hosea Biglow business that day. I told him I had been in his home and seen his mother, that I had once seen him in France; but he seemed to think that was ‘ my own look-out ’: if anybody wished to do anything so foolish, it was no concern of his.
But at last some little allusion made him snap his head around in the old way and look puzzled, and then he blurted out, ‘My—! are you the chap-
lain? And you mean to say you’ve been out to my town; you’ve been in my home! Gee, I’ll never forget this. This is worth a hundred dollars to me.’
So there we sat on the grass while he told me all that had happened in the year, laughed about his old infirmity and how I had caught him at it again, but said he was really getting over it. Months later, when he was discharged and I was in Boston again, he came to see me off at the train and said, ‘ Do you remember sending a cable home for me? You said a Plainfield lady had given you money for such things, and so I let you. But when you asked me what to say and I said, “Well and happy,” you set up a great kick and said you would n’t do it because it would only make matters worse, and so we had to dope out something else.’
Oh, yes— ‘well and happy.’ Never was anything so bad but that ‘well and happy’ would be the cheerful description of it. ‘With the death-rattle in his throat,’ says an Englishman, ‘ the British soldier will assure you he is “ doing fine.” ’ ‘Doing fine’were the exact words of the boy marine from Oregon when, to the amazement of us all, after two days he roused a little, though the great surgeon had said he would never recover consciousness. Always ‘doing fine.’ Only the minor things got a grumble from them, and the grumbling I could listen to all night because of its charm. The Georgia boy who had lain out in the field twenty-four hours before he was found, whose leg had been amputated at the hip, cheerfully asked me to write to his father in Rome and tell him all about it, but to do it ‘in such a way that he won’t worry any about it.’
One can imagine what sort of reliable information could be got out of a questionnaire sent to doughboys; and anyone who would be guided by what they said off-hand would be taking little account of the ‘ mystery of these men’; for the better you know them, the more the mystery increases. Ludendorff, accusing Von Bernstorff, says, ‘We took Americans prisoner who had an entirely wrong or vague conception of what they were fighting for.’ I relish the thought of what, with innocent countenance, a doughboy might have handed out to a German interrogator. Men who were always ‘doing fine’ when everything was at its worst could be trusted to ‘kid along’ an enemy questioner, and look as if they were hardly aware there was a war at all, or even make him believe they thought it was all about Votes for Women.
It was most unlikely that I should ever see again the lad who was shot in the St. Mihiel sector, for nobody seemed ever to have heard of his hamlet, nor was it on any map; but at last I got. track of it way down the Allegheny Valley among the coal-mines. If I got up early enough, left the train at a certain junction, and walked the track the next two miles, I was told that I would find it; but, as I discovered, that was only the post-office, his real home being a half-mile farther down the track. Yet even so it was better than Atlantic City, if R—T—was really at the end of it.
In the middle of the hot August morning I found the mine, and its seven or eight supporting houses climbing the steep slope that led up to it; and the last house up was where this husky nineteen-year-old miner lived. The last time I had seen him was the day when, knowing that he was to be shipped to the coast, I had gone along the street of Royat in the mountains of France, asking the men if they knew where he was, when suddenly he rushed bareheaded out of a café and said, ‘I heard you was inquirin’ for me, chaplain, and I just ran out to tell you myself that I was right in here, taking a last glass of beer, before any of them guys went and told you. That’s what I was doing, chaplain. But here I am.’
The boy’s sister told me that he was still sleeping, and that I could go in and wake him up if I wished. He just simply stared and stared and said nothing. Nothing would do but that I should stop and have another breakfast with him in the midst of a large and cordial family; but it was worth a night’s ride to see him sitting there, clean and collarless and healthy, and look out over our ham and eggs and past him across the valley where the boy had always lived.
‘Why did n’t you ever answer that letter I wrote you?’ I asked. And he, coloring up, laughed in his old way, and said nothing.
But his mother put in cheerily: ‘Now, I ’ll tell you just why, chaplain: it was because, if he did, he was afraid that some day, perhaps, when you were traveling, you might come and look him up and find out what a poor old place he lived in. ’
I asked him if that was so, and he said, ‘Well, yes, it was so, chaplain, to tell the truth, but it ain’t so any more. I can tell you, I ’m so glad you came.’
He took me up to the mine to meet his comrades as they came out on the trolley with their loads of coal, explaining as we went that he had quit work because of some new arrangement which took, as nearly as I could make out, some fifteen cents a day from his pay. He said he could make between six and eight dollars a day. Of course the layman immediately multiplies the maximum of eight dollars by three hundred working days in the year and estimates that the boy has a comfortable income of twenty-four hundred dollars, and wonders what he ever does with so much money, without a question as to how many days in the year he gets even the six dollars.
But I was not there to discuss economics but just for the joy of seeing the fine fellow again. His fellow miners were a bit puzzled for a while as to what R— might have in common with a chaplain; but finally, accepting me as a human being, they let it go at that and wanted to know why I could not stay a few days. It was just as it was in France; for somehow in the neighborhood of this lad cheerfulness would break in upon you, and life did seem simplified just by being with him as he went on telling of his life, his joys, and his happiness and amazement that anyone should remember him like this. As the day was closing, he took me down the bank to the railroad, — there was no station, — and signaled a train for me, and we parted. Comparisons are invidious, but none of the meetings was better than this.
III
‘And say, chaplain, you must n’t fail to look up C7#x8212;and L—; they ’re both working in the same cafe down the street; you ’ll find C—at the bar and L—at the lunch-counter,’ said one of the doctors in the once smoke-grimed but now — to me — romantic city. No fear that I should ever forget them. And there they were. L—got a call-down from an impatient customer for pausing thunderstruck to come out from behind the lunch-counter; but went back after whispering, ‘You just wait a few minutes, chaplain, and I ’ll fix you up all right.’
And then C— came up from the bar, and just sat down opposite me at a table and stared at me. The old days were all on again. Probably C— would be mad as a hatter at me for saying it, but there was some moisture in his eyes as we recalled the kitchen in the old Augustinian convent at Château-Thierry, and the midnight feeding of the doctors and the ambulanciers and the orderlies behind the blanketed windows. It was C— with whom I had walked up to see No-Man’s Land in the Argonne Forest, returning from whence at dusk, we found that Field Hospital 112 had moved bag and baggage in our few hours of absence, and there was nothing left except the chaplain’s baggage to show that we had ever been there.
The bar was a bit dull, and I judged that there was little going on there except talk and ‘two-seventy-five,’so that C—could always stop and visit. He was a Roman Catholic, and L—a Greek, and I a Presbyterian. The way that German Fatherland begat brotherhood in everybody that was against it is almost the best thing it has done.
An hour later, buying a paper at the street corner, I saw one of the best of them speeding past, and stepping after him, caught him by the coat and asked him where he was going so fast.
‘Going to your hotel to see you; that ’s where I’m going. I just heard fifteen minutes ago that you were here.’ And there he was.
It was on a cold October night in the shock ward made by hanging blankets in the corner of a wretched barn in Neuvilly of the Argonne that one of the boys had said, ‘ You’d better go over and speak to him, chaplain; he’s over there in the corner alone. He’s had bad news. His mother died.’
It was one of the good things of army life that you did not have to say much when there was not much to say. Meanings got conveyed if you meant them, and a word or two would make the friendship which it might have taken months to make at home. And what we really live for after all is to achieve now and then an hour or two such as we two had together. The war had done him nothing but good. Heartiness, openness, friendliness and cheer and courage, all these were in full force. I might have assumed that they would be, but assumptions have little edge, while actually going and finding out for myself sent me back into life with something new and fresh in it. All that I had known of him in France was just verified, and it was all there and waiting for you whenever you wanted to go and claim it.
I had written home about Dan so much that the family had come to be familiar with him. A small Irish lad who was confined to the ‘Itch Tent’ on the Marne, he was the quietest of them all, but somehow his manner made him notable and his lack of wants made you all the more ready to fill any that he had; so that you found yourself dropping into the ‘Hôtel de Scabies,’ as they had cheerfully labeled it, because it made you feel more comfortable to have a word with Dan. The day had come for him to be shipped away, and as he had never asked for anything, for that very reason I opened the whole wonderful supply of the Red Cross, rules or no rules, and told him to take anything he wanted, whether it was intended for officers or for men. The Red Cross was not obsessed with the idea of symmetry or rules, and every time I broke a regulation it was fruitful, and whenever I nearly broke my neck trying to observe one, no good came of it that I ever had any account of. Dan was well outfitted when he climbed into the great truck which was to carry him off. And that was the last of him, save for a letter saying that he never could talk much but hoped I understood his way and knew that he appreciated all that the Red Cross had been to him.
One day months later, — for my friends at home now knew Dan almost as well as I did, — there came from them across the sea a clipping from a Boston paper, with Dan’s picture and the news that he had fallen. It was not easy to drop Dan out of the list of the living. I could not get over the feeling that I could have another page of that pleasant friendship if I tried: there must be a little more, and while it would be fainter in outline, it must be that his family, if I could find them, could add something to my treasures of memory and I to theirs. So, enjoining the postmaster of his city to do all he could to find the family of this soldier, I drew a bow at a venture and sent my letter off.
In three days came a letter from Dan himself saying that he had been shot within two hours after going over the top, but was alive, all there, well again, and waiting to see me when I could come. At last I found him. At the top of the Parker House steps there stood a boy in blue serge, whom I glanced at and then passed by until something made me turn to look again —and it was Dan. He had dropped work at the gauge-factory and come into town at once.
I have not much idea what Dan and I talked about. ‘A grand evening,’ said Carlyle, after a whole evening spent in smoke-encircled silence with a friend. You hardly know what to say first with someone who has been reported dead and is alive again; but you find your way. But Dan’s silences on the Marne had only helped to draw out friendship there, and it was good to find that in Massachusetts it was just the same, and I could have it all the rest of my life.
IV
On a rainy Sunday in New York the elevator man rang to say that there was a plumber below who wished to see me. As I could think of no plumber who could have any business with me, Joe explained that the man’s name was E—,
and he came from Pennsylvania. The name was enough to recall one of the bitterest tragedies of the Argonne. A father and a younger brother had traveled all night just to come and have a word. So through the long rainy afternoon we sat, while they told me about the boy who was killed up there at Neuvilly Bridge — about his heartiness and his quickness to forgive, his mistakes and his desire to make good, and his commander’s letter about how the boy had done it.
Then they in turn wanted all the details of that roadside burial which, for all the roughness of its surroundings, was not without some unusual honors. A great French truck train had stopped beside us, hemming us quite in, in our little cove beside the road, with every motor running with such noise as to make a service impossible, until a French captain, seeing our difficulty, gave a signal which stopped every motor the length of the train, and then another signal which brought every French soldier to join us till the service was done. Each burial seemed to have something distinct about it, and one never knew just what would break out: there was scarcely one where something did not happen if you had eyes to see it. That day, prompted by I know not what, the American boys all knelt suddenly in the dirt and so remained till it was over. A hundred times I had thought about that boy’s home; for with the sergeant I had gone over his pocket treasures, and his home and love for it to an unusual degree were written all over everything he possessed. Today the boy’s home had come to me.
The mess-sergeant has been sending messages with regard to dates in October. He cannot be certain yet, but is anxious to know if I will be in the city on or around a certain day. At last it dawns across me what may be afoot and I ask bluntly, ‘Is he going to bring his bride?’ ‘Yes, that is just it, chaplain.’ And at last they come. This is a crowning compliment, and no ring at the door could announce a more welcome pair. The bride may have suffered a bit under the flood of reminiscence into which we plunged at once. Of course, we are not so dull as not to know that pretty soon we shall have to keep still about it or the friends will say, ‘Good heavens, have they got going again?’ or, more politely, ‘Suppose we go out into the garden now.’ Yet I think it will always be possible, like the Lantern-Bearers, to have our stealthy reunions and keep alive about the best friendship that ever was on sea or land.
And then there is a wealth of little unexpected meetings everywhere. We all have them. It is a joy to be buying your ticket at a station window, and have a smiling chap step up and say, ‘I beg pardon, but were n’t you a chaplain overseas?’ To be sure; but with all the good fortunes of that year, I could not realize for a minute or two that I had ever been friends with this gracious stranger; yet so it was. He was now buying his ticket from Boston, to go and bury himself in a little western hamlet and its spinning-mill, to learn the trade. But we had three hours together, and when he wrote months afterward from his little mill, and said that he had been pretty lonesome but had always remembered our luncheon together as his farewell to Boston, it made me feel like Newman’s allusion to the snapdragon at Trinity.
‘You’ll run across our men everywhere around here, chaplain,’ had been his last words; and within five minutes, sauntering across the Common, came a familiar form. It was M—, the prize-fighter. Our friendship had begun by his asking me to receive his confession in the château of Luzancy; but though I had told him I could not, John always dogged my steps after that, sidling up to me on all occasions and seeming to think that I could do it perfectly well if I only wanted to. Telling him that he was the third prize-fighter with whom my fortunes had become linked in France, I added that my friends all laughed me to scorn because I had said that what chiefly impressed me about the three was the gentleness of them.
At this John fairly beamed on me. ‘Say, now, chaplain, you’ve said it, you’ve said it. You’ve hit the nail on the head this time. People think we ’re a lot of rough-necks, but it ain’t so. Why, chaplain, we would n’t harm a rabbit.'
So with this paradox passed, John unfolded to me his present scheme of a restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue somewhere, and made me a customer in advance.
In another city, one whom I had last seen in the region around Mont Sec seized me on Saturday night and begged that I would come out to his suburb Sunday morning early, go to his Bible class with him, and then home to see his father and mother. When I told him that I could not because of a day full of engagements, he changed his tone and said, ‘Well, now, you’ve just got to, you’ve got to. Now, listen, and I’ll tell you why you’ve got to.’
Then he told me why, and after that there was nothing to do but go. Nobody could have resisted that reason, nobody would have, and I went. It was just as he said. I went, and my aftermath will always be richer for that going; but the reason is just between A—and me.
But think not, gentle reader, that it was always church services on which these friendships were based. There were many which sprang into existence there, and these are the hardest to tell about. You tell about these only to groups of individuals. But many friendships came to be for the very last reason in the world. Around the corner one day, as I was rushing to get a train, there swung the Headquarters truck driver, as a result of which I did not take a train until hours later. John could furnish an incontestable alibi as regards any of my services. It was not these which had cemented our friendship. As a matter of fact, John had run off with my wash-basin and water-bucket and a small store of select Red Cross things which were not designed for the well but for the sick. The loss was no small matter up in the neighborhood of Fismes, and I opened negotiations for their recovery; but John’s explanations and theories and arguments carried on through many days; the fertility, invention, earnestness, and charm with which he variously accounted for their disappearance made me finally drop the search for my belongings and take him for a lifelong friend instead.
‘I don’t believe they are half as interesting as you claim,’ said a New Yorker who was taking me out into New Jersey to hunt up one of the choice buck privates whom I had traced to a dairy there. ‘I saw a group of them the other day in the street,’he remarked, ‘and after all you had said, I took a good look at them, and I confess they did n’t look very interesting to me.’
At length we saw Ike coming along the country road in his overalls, leading an old horse homeward from the cornfield at the end of a sweltering afternoon. We want home to supper with him and his wife, and as we sat there I could see layer after layer of crust dissolving on the surface of my friend, until at last, when we were ready to go, he whispered to me to ask if he could n’t invite them both to visit him in New York. As we rode away, he, all aglow, said, ‘Why, that’s a wonderful fellow. I don’t wonder you wanted to see him. I have n’t seen anybody more attractive.’ And then, as if to preserve some of his earlier doubt, ‘ Still, I don’t believe there are many like that.’
With the proper prodigality of one who had known some thousands of them, I told him that I could show him hundreds just as good as Ike.
The week that does not bring letters from them is a week lost now. ‘All I ask for is to git back to B—, Kansas, and git to farming again as soon as possible,’ said K—, rubbing the stump of his arm up at Royat. He writes to say that already he drives the team as well as ever, breaks young horses to ride, and drives a car ‘like anyone else. . . . And the girl — well, pardon me, chaplain, for I do like her; at least, they say I show it with this one arm of mine.’
The statesmanlike suggestions as to the reconstruction of Church and State with which it was prophesied that the A.E.F. would return quite loaded up are strangely lacking, though Bill Anderson thinks the government has been fooling around long enough and ought to get something settled by this time. Their lack of anything to say about the issues of the time always makes me think of what a parishioner of Emerson’s said of him. When asked what kind of a minister Emerson was, he replied that in most ways he was very acceptable, but that he was no good at funerals and never seemed to know what to say when anyone was dead. My friends of the army are endlessly satisfying on most subjects, but they never seem to know what to say about a battle or a wound or a lost limb or saving democracy, and generally act as if those were subjects to which they had never given any thought.
Hardly a week goes by without establishing communications with some family whose son rests overseas. After a year and a half I find the California family whose son I buried by the buttress of the ruined church of ChéryChartreuve, and who write to say that every crumb of knowledge about him is priceless to them now. That burial stands out because of the son himself, about whom I always felt that some day I should know more, — I wanted to, — and because of the ambulancedriver, a stranger to me, who helped lay him in his grave and then bolted just at the benediction and hid himself behind the church. There I found him after they had all gone. He had seen many such events, but this somehow smote him and sent him off alone. It was not till six weeks later that I saw him again, and in the Argonne, red with confusion because I had seen him give way, until he found I thought none the less of him for it; and after that it was a jocose query in his section as to how on earth Y—and the chaplain had got so well acquainted.
Every few weeks the wheel comes around full circle and puts me in touch with people I have been wondering about and searching for. None of the orderlies at Château-Thierry ever forgot L— and his sufferings from gas
and the way he bore them; but it is only now, after a year and a half, that I can tell his wife in West Virginia about him; and to-day his picture and his history are in my hands and the full story of his fortitude and faith is in hers.
One day the mail brought a little folder of board-covers, and opening it, I found pages of my own handwriting which I recognized as the letter I had sent to Oregon to the father of the boy marine who was shot at Belleau Wood. It seemed a strange thoughtfulness that he should return my letter, until, looking more closely, I found that it was my letter photographed which, with the boy’s portrait and a beautiful tribute from an uncle, they had made their memorial for the boy. These families come to seem like your very own.
When three months in a new home had put me out of reach of the old outfits, and not a day of a dreary winter had gone by without longing for them, who should burst in on me, hurried, hatless, and welcome, but Vincent of the 23rd Ambulance. There he had been, living in the fraternity house next door, all the time. My first rides on the ambulance had been with him along the stretches of the Marne and between Coulommiers and Bézu-le-Guery, and it was he who had created my enthusiastic opinion of ambulance men which never afterward changed. The fact that the war had set him backtwo years in his studies he was taking cheerfully; and he was to me ‘almost providential,’ as the cautious old Princeton professor used to put it, for I could now look forward to two years with one of the best of them always at hand.
But there are others to whom I have no clue. I cannot imagine now why I did not make sure of them when I could; but in the haste of it all, they drifted out. I would like to know those two stragglers who had walked miles in the sun to find a canteen, only to discover that it had moved. They were now on the return journey, and I met them on the road just opposite Quentin Roosevelt’s grave, walking toward Chamery. These two had something on their minds. A few days before they had found along the roadside, up by ‘St. Gillies,’ as they called it, an American boy unburied, and had managed somehow to make a grave and lay him in it. And then, as one of them said, they did not know what to do next. There was no chaplain within reach, and ‘we ain’t neither of us very religious. You know how it is, chaplain; but we could n’t stand for burying him like that, so we just agreed we’d stand over the grave and say what Bible verses we could both remember. And so we did that.’ Then they asked me if, the next time I went up that way, I would not go to that spot and read a real service. ‘ You can’t miss it. About two hundred yards beyond the railroad tracks as you go out of “ St. Gillies,” and his name is Zaner.’ But those two immortals slipped away.
And Betts! I shall never quite give up the hope of finding Betts again. Whether it was gas or bronchitis that brought him into Field Hospital 111 at Courmont, I do not know. But it was he who, with incredible adroitness, without moving from his bed, got me out between nine and ten at night, when all was black and still in the field, and made me break open enough chocolate for him and his two hundred fellow patients. I had been off all day to get it at Cohan, and had not got back until dark; and not daring to go near the tents until they were all asleep, I at last stole down to the entrance of one of them, to have some whispered consultation with an orderly, when up from the middle of the black silent tent rose a husky, drawling, cheerful voice: ‘Oh, my eyes are sore watching all day under that tent for you to come!’
Walking down into the tent, I asked who it was that was having all this eye trouble. ‘Oh, it’s only me, Betts,’ he laughed. Betts by daylight could get almost anything out of you, but Betts at night was even more appealing. There was nothing to do but go back and stealthily break open enough for him and his forty in the same tent; but while I was gone, the villain had with true comradeship got the news swiftly across to all the other tents, and there was no rest for the weary until the whole two hundred had been fed up. When it was all over, and in the darkness I had given Betts five times his proper share and was passing out, he called after me, ‘ Good night, chaplain, my eyes are getting better every minute.' Through military channels I am now advertising for Betts.