It was the Unknown Soldier Boy that put an end to the doubt, the faultfinding, the cynicism that was in the air of Washington as the day for the opening of the Conference approached. It all became vanity, pettiness, beside that bier with its attending thousands of mourning people.

They carried the body to the capitol where for a day it lay in state. Busy with my attempts to learn something of what it was all about, it was not until late in the afternoon that I thought of the ceremony on the hill, and made my way there for my daily walk. It had been a soft, sunny day, the air full of gray haze. Everything around the great plaza—the Capitol, the library, the trees, the marble Senate and House buildings right and left—was tender in its outline. There were no crowds, but as I looked I saw massed four abreast from the entrance door to the rotunda, down along terraces of steps, across the plaza as far as I could see, a slowly moving black mass, kept in perfect line by soldiers standing at intervals. I made my way across. Where was its end? I went to find it.

I walked the width of the great plaza and turned down the Avenue. As far as I could see the people were massed—one block, two blocks, three blocks, four—and from every direction you could see men and women hurrying to fall in line. I had had no idea of joining that line, of passing through that rotunda. My only notion was to take a glimpse of the crowd. But to have gone on, to have been no part of something which came upon me as tremendous in its feeling and meaning, would have been a withdrawal from my kind of which I think I should always have been ashamed. And so I fell in.

The mass moved slowly, but very steadily. The one strongest impression was of its quietness. Nobody talked. Nobody seemed to want to talk. If a question was asked, the reply was low. We moved on block after block—turned the corner—now we faced the Capitol—amazingly beautiful, proud and strong in the dim light. I never had so deep a feeling that it was something that belonged to me, guarded me, meant something to me, than as I moved slowly with that great mass toward the bier. The sentinels stood rigid, as solemn and as quiet as the people. The only murmur that one heard was now and then a low singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” How it began, who suggested it, I do not know; but through all that slow walk, the only thing that I heard was women’s voices, now behind me, now before me, humming that air. It took a full three-quarters of an hour to reach the door and pass into the rotunda. It took strong self-control not to kneel by the bier. They told me that there were women, bereft mothers, to whom the appeal was too much—mothers of missing boys. This might have been hers. Could she pass? The guards lifted them very gently, and in quiet the great crowd moved forward. I fancy there were thousands that passed that place that day that will have always before their eyes that great dim circle with bank upon bank of flowers, from all over the earth—flowers from kings and queens and governments, from great leaders of armies, from those who labor, from the mothers of men, and hundreds upon hundreds from those who went out with the dead but came back. The only sound that came to us as we passed was the clear voice of a boy, one of a group, once soldiers. They came with a wreath. They carried a flag. The leader was saying his farewell to their buddy.

A hundred thousand or more men and women made this pilgrimage. A hundred thousand and many more packed the streets of Washington the next day when the bier was carried from the Capitol to the grave at Arlington.

The attending ceremony was one of the most perfect things of the kind ever planned. It had the supreme merit of restraint. Every form of the country’s service had a place—not too many—a few—but they were always of the choicest—from the President of the United States down to the last marine, the best we had were chosen to follow the unknown boy.

There was an immense sincerity to it all. They felt it—the vast, inexpressible sorrow of the war. And no one felt it more than the President of the United States. What he said at Arlington, what he was to say the next day at the opening of the Conference, showed that with all his heart and all his mind the man hated the thing that had brought this sorrow to the country, and that he meant to do his part to put an end to it.

The ceremony was for the dead sacrifice, but the feature of it which went deepest to the heart and brought from the massed crowds their one instinctive burst of sympathy and greeting was the passing, almost at the end of the procession, of the War’s living sacrifice—Woodrow Wilson.

The people had stood in silence, reverently baring their heads as the bier of the soldier passed, followed by all the official greatness of the moment—the President of the United States, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, Pershing, Foch. And then, quite unexpectedly, a carriage came into view—two figures in it—a white-faced man, a brave woman. Unconscious of what they were doing, the crowd broke into a muffled murmur—“Wilson!” The cry flowed down the long avenue—a surprised, spontaneous recognition. It was as if they said: “You—you of all living men belong here. It was you who called the boy we are honoring—you who put into his eye that wonderful light—the light that a great French surgeon declared made him different as a soldier from the boys of any other nation.”

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “whether it is God, the Monroe Doctrine or President Wilson, but the American soldier has a light in his eye that is not like anything that I have ever seen in men.” Woodrow Wilson, under God, had put it there. His place was with the soldier. The crowd knew it, and told him so by their unconscious outburst.

His carriage left the procession at the White House. Later the crowd followed it. All the afternoon of Armistice Day men and women gathered before his home. All told there were thousands of them. They waited, hoping for his greeting. And when he gave it, briefly, they cheered and cheered. But they did not go away. It was dark before that crowd had dispersed.

But this expression of love and loyalty and interest in Woodrow Wilson is no new thing in Washington. For months now, on Sundays and holidays, men, women and children have been walking to his home, standing in groups before it, speaking together in hushed tones as if something solemn and ennobling stirred in them. Curiosity? No. Men chatter and jibe and jostle in curiosity. These people are silent—gentle—orderly. You will see them before the theater, too, when it is known that he is within, quietly waiting for him to come out—one hundred, two hundred, five hundred—even a thousand sometimes, it is said. They cheer him as he passes—and there are chokes in their voices—and always tenderness. Let it be known that he is in his seat in a theater, and the house will rise in homage. Let his face be thrown on a screen, and it will receive a greeting that the face of no other living American will receive. It requires explanation.

The people at least recognized him as belonging to the Conference. And, as a matter of fact, the Conference never was able to escape him. Again and again, he appeared at the table. The noblest words that were said were but echoes of what he had been saying through the long struggle. The President’s great slogan—Less of armaments and none of war—was but another way of putting the thing for which he had given all but his last breath. The best they were to do—their limitation of armaments, their substitute to make it possible, were but following in the path that he had cut. The difficulties and hindrances which they were to meet and which were to hamper both program and final settlements were but the difficulties and hindrances which he had met and which hampered his work at Paris. From the start to the finish of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, the onlooker recognized both the spirit and the hand of Woodrow Wilson as the crowd recognized him on Armistice Day.

There was another figure in the memorial procession which deeply touched the crowd and which stayed on, uninvited. She came with the dead soldier boy. She stood by him night and day as he lay in state, followed him to the grave in which they laid him away at Arlington, a symbol of the nation’s grief over all its missing sons. She did not go with the crowds. She took her place at the door of the Conference, and there, day by day, her solemn voice was heard.

“I am the mother of men. Never before have I lifted my voice in your councils. I have been silent because I trusted you. But to-day I speak because I doubt you. I have the right to speak, for without me mankind would end. I bear you with pain, such as you cannot know. I rear you with sacrifice, such as you cannot understand. I am the world’s perpetual soldier, facing death that life may be. I do not recoil from my great task. God laid it on me. I have accepted it always. I give my youth that the world may have sons, and I glory in my harvest.

“But I bear sons for fruitful lives of labor and peace and happiness. And what have you done with my work? To-day I mourn the loss of more than ten million dead, more than twenty million wounded, more than six million imprisoned and missing. This is the fruit of what you call your Great War.

“It is I who must face death to replace these dead and maimed boys. I shall do it. But no longer shall I give them to you unquestioning as I have in the past, for I have come to doubt you. You have told me that you used my sons for your honor and my protection, but I have begun to read your books, to listen to your deliberations, to study your maneuvers; I have learned that it is not always your honor and my protection that drives you to war. Again and again it is your own love of glory, of power, of wealth; your hate and contempt for those that are not of your race, your color, your point of view. You cannot longer have my sons for such ends. I ask you to remold your souls, to make effective that brotherhood of man of which you talk, to learn to work together, white and black and brown and yellow, as becomes the sons of the same mother.

“I shall never leave your councils again. My daughters shall sit beside you voicing my command—you shall have done with war.”