We were seated together at a Liberty-Loan dinner in Buffalo. He was in the British uniform and "wore" a cane, not a dress cane, but a heavy stick that took the place of a crutch. A naturalized American citizen, he enlisted first in an Irish regiment. After recovering from a serious wound he was discharged, but a few weeks in New York left him a restless man with eyes turning ever toward the sea. On the thirtieth of November, 1916, he re-enlisted, this time with a Canadian regiment in Toronto. Again he was "shot to pieces." Now he hobbles about with the same nervous eagerness that forced him away from home the second time. Another honorable discharge has not satisfied him, and he said to me,

"I hope I get over this so that I can re-enlist, this time under the Stars and Stripes."

No man who has been "over there" is ever again satisfied while water remains between him and the front. Not that he forms an appetite for war; he hates war. But so long as the fighters fight he will be in the valley of discontent when he is not on the field of action.

In England and in Scotland I found scores of men pining for France. They had been eager to get back to "Blighty." With straining eyes they had watched for her shores through the mists of the morning as the hospital ship found the channel of the home port, but now they begged for a chance to get back. Lieutenant-Colonel Cote, on his way to rejoin in Italy his command which he had left on the Somme when a bullet through his shoulder and back laid him low, said to me:

"I could not stay. They offered me a desk in London, and it was tough to leave the wife and little girls; but I couldn't stay."

At that time he was one of six men in the British Empire who had three times received the "D. S. O." (Distinguished Service Order)—once in South Africa where he enlisted as a private, and twice in France. After five months he was sufficiently recovered from his third wound to report for duty.

What is this spirit, the spirit of the trenches? There is humor in it. Lieutenant Johrens, who returned with me from France, was on the Tuscania when she was sent down by submarine attack. As the destroyer which picked up the boat company of which he was in charge cruised about in the darkness near the scene of the catastrophe, the officers heard singing in the distance. Searching out the spot from which the voices came, they found twenty privates on a catamaran, shouting lustily the refrain of the popular song,

The Lieutenant added that a French pastor in Tours on being told the story seemed deeply impressed, but not even slightly amused. The next Sunday, referring to the incident, he said impressively to his sympathetic congregation:

"Our brave allies are not only men of action; they are all men of deep spiritual conviction. In danger their thoughts turn instinctively toward God. As they clung to their frail raft in the darkness of the tempest and the blackness of the night, they searched their hearts, and with the mingled emotions of men facing the vast unknown they sang that glorious old Billy Sunday hymn,

The humor of homesickness makes no pretence, and is unashamed. A chap from Montana came up to the canteen counter behind which I stood, and said,

"Say, did you ever hear the story of the Statue of Liberty?" and I replied,

"Which one?"

He tipped his helmet forward, mocked me with a deep bow, and said,

"This one: A fellow had been started toward Davy Jones's locker three times by 'subs.' Finally he got a tub that made through connections; and, as he came up the harbor of 'little ol' Broadway,' he saw the 'Lady' standing up there and looking out through the mist, holding the lamp up to the window for him, and saying, 'Hello, kid; welcome home!' and he swallowed his Adam's apple, stood at attention, saluted, and said, 'Thank you, madam; I'm mighty glad to see you. But, if you ever see me again, you'll have to turn around!'"

He didn't wait for a laugh. He knew that the tale had "whiskers" and that many a man now old "had kicked the slats out of his cradle" in protesting against its resurrection. He hadn't told it to amuse me, but to "spill himself." But I laughed just the same, for it was richly done.

I watched the artist of the story as he proceeded to unlimber "Jenny," the fifteen-dollar talking-machine that stood in the far corner of the cellar in which this particular Y. M. C. A. canteen was located. No corner of that cellar was as far as thirty feet from any other corner. It was not more than sixteen hundred yards from our most advanced position, and directly in front of a great battery which just then was exchanging "calls" with the enemy. It sounded like a dozen Fourth of Julys outside, with cannon crackers and bombs not excluded.

The story-teller fingered through the records until he found the one his mood called for; then he removed his helmet to ease his weary head,—regulations allowed him to uncover while underground,—sat down on a biscuit-box directly in front of the sound-chamber, and, with his unshaven chin in his dirty, cracked hand, waited, close up, for the first word. There, in that old cellar under a ruined French chateau, I heard Alma Gluck sing "Little Gray Home in the West." She has sung it to vast multitudes in great halls, and to distinguished people in quiet parlors; she has set the world a-weeping with the exquisite pain of her song; but she never sang more effectively than she sang that night among the noisome odors of a dark dugout of the front line, with shrapnel and high explosives for an accompaniment and a homesick lad from Montana for her audience.

What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of rare comradeship. I never saw a man injure another man up there, or seek to. Quarrels? Sure! and personal encounters now and then, but these are few and far between. There are little time and strength for them, of course, and there are few opportunities; but, when they do happen, they are differences of words that do not have two meanings and of fists that come through the open.

I have seen a man carry, in addition to his own kit, the entire equipment of another man who was suffering from gas. Three miles and a half, under the severest conditions of opening spring, through mud-filled trenches he walked with his double load, helping a man he had never seen before.

In one of our companies were two Portuguese. One could not speak English. He was terribly dependent upon his "buddy." While I was with the battalion to which his company belonged, the "buddy" was killed. The distress of the man who did not understand the language of the country he loved and for whose just cause he had volunteered his all was most affecting. But how the other men of that company got about him! They swore that he should not have a single lonely minute. Indeed, they nearly ruined the chap with their kindness. They were in a fair way to destroy his stomach with their gifts and his constitution by their vigilance, which actually robbed him of sleep, when a wise-headed corporal took command of the situation and set them right.

It is this spirit of man's thoughtfulness for his brother, man's tenderness with man, that reassures me when I ask, "How will this stupendous man-hunt affect the heart of the race?" And the fighter is not unaware of the question. Indeed, he asks it himself. I heard a young major who was saying a farewell to a group of his friends at a church banquet in a Canadian city say,

"I go away determined, God helping me, to do my hardest duty; to render my country and the empire an enthusiastic and utmost service; and to carry myself so that when I come back, if I come back, little children will run to me as confidently as they do now."

What is the spirit of the trenches? It is the spirit of service that has no interrogation points. One night a shriek of agony came ringing back to our line from a listening-post in No Man's Land. A chaplain was "up," a Roman Catholic. He crawled down the shallow communicating trench to the wounded soldier, found him with a foot smashed by a grenade, unconscious, and bleeding to death. He stanched the flow of blood as best he could, and somehow got the man back. And then, after the stretcher party had carried the "casualty" to the dressing-station, and while they waited for the ambulance, he prayed with the lad. A few days later he said to me, "I didn't think a Catholic's prayer would hurt a Protestant boy." And it was a Protestant padre, we are told, who ministered to the dying Major Redmond on a battle-field of Flanders.

There is no "grousing" in the trenches. I heard no complaints from men who were straining their vital forces to the utmost. It is great to hear them when they come out, though! How they do vent their spleen upon springs that are a bit uneven, these fellows who have been wallowing in mud and ice for days without a word in their misery!

A runner came in one morning after thirty-six hours of continuous duty. He was chilled to the bone, and one foot was in bad shape. He had neither overcoat nor blankets; his entire equipment had been buried by the shelling incident to a raid. We leaned him against the great tea-boiler, and while he stood there warming his body we poured hot drinks into his stomach. Turning away for a moment, I was startled by a clatter behind me. There he was, his cup on the floor; he was dead asleep on his feet.

I have seen lads fall asleep on the rough boards of a Y. M. C. A. hut, with only the nondescript materials for covers that we could hastily throw over them. Not even the noises of great batteries, and of hundreds of soldiers passing in and out, disturbed them in the least.

Not a whimper, not a whisper of rebellion, came from them. Oh, I do not believe that I shall ever again complain about any hardship without despising myself. What a task we at home have, to be worthy of them!

There are so many tales of unalloyed courage, and so many to tell them well, that I have purposely committed this chapter largely to a very faulty pen-picture of another side of the spiritual portrait of the American soldier. His bravery is very prompt and very honest, and no soldier of the world is braver. He confesses his fear, which is not pretended; tells how fast he ran, how paralyzed his tongue was, how he caught himself saying, "Engine, engine number nine, running on Chicago line," or wiping his forehead with his revolver! But all the time he has not turned away from the line of duty by a single hair.

The type of his courage is unmistakable. It would be very poor form for an American to speak of this in any way that would make invidious comparisons, and to speak thus would insult the American soldier, who so thoroughly appreciates and so enthusiastically magnifies at his own expense the prowess of our allies who have done so much for us, who for four years have stood between us and destruction, and who even now must very largely teach us the modern art of national self-defence. "Private Peat" was of course over-enthusiastic in his praise, but he indicated a quality of bravery that I never failed to find in the American army in France when he said: "They are far ahead of the English and French in many ways. They are more active, more quick in thinking, and can decide in an instant what to do in battle. They have already made a wonderful record. Every allied soldier honors them." I saw the native genius of American fliers strikingly illustrated in an aviation contest between student fliers and their instructors. Every event—bomb-dropping, handling of machine guns, and trick flying—was won by the students.

And the spirit of the trenches is not confined to those who stand in the mud of the trenches and experience their horrors. In Basingstoke, England, one night I sat with a queenly woman of seventy in front of a typical English grate fire. The war has taken much away from her; and, as she talked with such quiet determination and in tones so rich with suffering, she said, "We who have been in the trenches for nearly four years ——"

Ah, yes, the women too have been in the farthest places of the line. The long vigils of the soldier in nights that promise only terror and in days that bring only hardship are not kept alone. The mothers of men, their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts stand there too. And not only these, but the fathers and the brothers denied the privilege of bearing arms, but entering into the supreme ordeals of those who do bear them, by day and by night, in tense silence suffer in spirit the agonies which the bodies of their sons and brothers must experience at every station of the flaming trail that leads from the base to the far rim of No Man's Land.

In a city of Scotland one night I was introduced by the "provost," the mayor. He was quiet, but fully master of the situation. At the close of the meeting my host told me that the chairman who had presented me had that afternoon received a message informing him of the death in action of his third and last son. The provost was in the trenches that night.

I have watched the long hospital trains pull into London stations during a "big push." I have seen the crowded ambulances dash by, and the dense crowds lining the streets. I have caught at the tightening of my throat when some grievously wounded man has waved a hand, or smiled, or wriggled a foot (if the arm was helpless) at the shouting multitude. And no less glorious has been the spirit of news-laddies who in rags and tatters have pressed their papers upon bandaged Tommies who were able to sit up—laddies from the submerged East Side, pauperizing themselves for a week because their hearts called them. And no less glorious than the spirit of these newsies has been the devotion of the flower-women, just as poor as the boys in "CÆsar's coin" and just as rich in true devotion, some of them in black with only memories to fill the chairs where strong men once sat—flower-women who, with tears in their eyes that for the soldiers' sake they will not shed, crowd about those wagons of mercy, showering the blanketed figures with primroses and daisies.

What is this spirit,—this spirit of laughter and of tears; this spirit that goes and that stays; this spirit that slays without becoming cruel and that turns, as the needle turns toward the pole, back again toward hardness and danger, choosing to walk the trench of death rather than to linger in the paths of life; this spirit that is both old and young, and that flourishes in the thin soil of poverty as luxuriantly as it blooms in the fields of the rich?

It is the spirit that I found in the Gillespie home in Edinburgh. When the war came, there were two sons to add strength to the grace that two daughters brought to that fireside. Now the line runs out to the valley of the Somme, and ends there beneath the flowers of Flanders. Tom died in the rear-guard fighting from Mons to the Marne. Bey fell at the head of his men in a charge on the twenty-fifth of September, 1915. Tom's oars (he was captain of the Oxford eight) hang in the hall and his picture at the left of the mantel in the library. Bey, whose letters to his mother have been published as "Letters from Flanders," was the finest scholar turned out by Oxford in a generation. His picture hangs just across the mantel from that of his brother.

In that room we sat and discussed the mighty advance just then at its height; the possibility of its reaching the Channel ports, capturing Paris, overrunning France, separating the British and French armies. We discussed the worst! And then they said, they who had laid so rich an offering upon the altar of liberty:

"Back against the shores of this island the British fleet will stand and hold, hold while America brings up the reserves of civilization. They shall not pass! They shall not pass!"

What is this spirit? I found it everywhere. The very stones of France cried out with its voices; the shattered trees of the forest were the strings of a harp that sang with it; the eyes of the smallest child were filled with it; and aged men in the fields, and gray-haired women pushing carts through the streets of the cities, were monuments to it that cathedral-levelling shells could not destroy.

As a troop-train pulled out of a great station in Paris late one afternoon, I saw a sight that will always remain with me as one of the most appealing and suggestive pictures of this war. Perhaps five hundred people were standing on the platform, saying a last good-by to their loved ones and friends bound for the hungry front. With hands outreaching and faces in the sun they stood in a great tableau of farewell as we drew slowly away. And as I looked into the profound depths of those faces, I was swept by a torrent of emotion that left me a changed man. They, and millions of others they represent, are the fathers and mothers, the sisters, wives, sweethearts, brothers, and friends of unnumbered and never-to-return young men. All have felt the agony of this war's separations and loss, have poured out their treasure and their blood. We cannot speak for them, we who only now begin to enter into their suffering. But we can speak for ourselves; we can deliver our own souls.

We too have been in this war since 1914, but until a few months ago France and Britain fought our battles for us. As surely as the principles for which we now fight, and our American ideals and liberties, were governing facts with us four years ago, so surely the same misgoverned power that threatens them now threatened them then. The British fleet in the North Sea, the British Tommy in the trenches of Flanders, and the soldiers of France, have made the wall of iron and the dike of flesh and bone against the flood of autocracy and absolutism that otherwise would have broken through to ingulf Europe, America, and the world.

The United States is forever in the debt of those who for unspeakable months held the lines against the day of her arrival. What we do, and all that we can do, will not be an unmerited investment from the standpoint of those peoples who, war-weary and impoverished, yet hold fast. As for ourselves, it is the price of our progress and of our very life.

He is less than a loyal American and he is without the knowledge of gratitude who speaks with a slight of the allies of his country. The broken men in London's streets, the cripples by the Seine, the armless lads who wear the badge of far-away Australia, the bandaged ones from New Zealand and the maimed from Canada, leave me blinded with my tears of pride and acknowledgment. The wide-eyed women of Brittany in their simple black, and the children so strangely quiet, the matrons of England, Italy, Ireland, and Wales, and their sisters in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, whose unshed tears are like lost rivers, tell me of my debt, America's debt.

And let us not forget the plight of Serbia and Montenegro, the complete agony of Roumania. If our war is just and if Justice never forgets, then the United States will not remain a nation long enough to lose from her memory the travail of these hapless people to whom all is now lost but honor. And nothing that Russia, Russia betrayed by those of her own household and destroyed by an unscrupulous enemy—nothing that Russia does now or fails to do hereafter will wipe from the page of history the imperishable glory of her six million sons dead or maimed, who, inadequately equipped and hopelessly led, were fed in Freedom's name to the ruthless god of war.

To-day Democracy has become as one nation; thus she stands or falls. The far-bending line behind Mt. Kemmel and in front of Amiens, and every line that shall confront Imperial Germany until autocracy has been finally conquered, is our line. It is not four thousand miles away, and there is no ocean between it and us. It runs through the heart of the United States and of Canada. Those who hold it with their backs against the wall of destiny, whether they fight beneath the Union Jack, the tricolor of France, or the Stars and Stripes, are soldiers of the Republic.

This spirit of gratitude and understanding is the spirit of the American trenches, for in them are Americans who have entered into the sufferings of a world that loves liberty enough to give the best, the last, and all, to preserve it. I found no boasting in our trenches; men did not say, "We have come to win the war." They said with an all-convincing earnestness, "We have come to help win the war." And now behind our trenches are fathers and mothers and friends; these too have entered into this vast fellowship of pain, and they too begin to know.

More eloquently than any words of mine can describe it the verses of Private William I. Grundish, Company C of the U. S. Engineers, A. E. F.,—verses which first appeared in the Paris edition of The New York Herald,—have given a voice to the soul of the American soldier. Private Grundish called the poem

Lieutenant Dinsmore Ely was killed in France in the aviation service on April 21, 1918. On April 29 his father, Dr. James O. Ely of Winnetka, Ill., received a letter from him written just before his death. The letter ends thus:

"And I want to say in closing, If anything should happen to me, let's have no mourning in spirit or in dress. Like a Liberty Bond, it is an investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country. It is an honor to a family, and is that the time for weeping?"

"It is an investment, not a loss, when a man dies for his country." Here is the spirit of the trenches: it is the spirit that cries, "With this I give myself." It is sacrifice, and sacrifice is the spirit of victory.