Between
France and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal good
feeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke the
kindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette.
Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life--what
was France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as the
French have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant but
at that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war.
But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west.
What had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on its
laurels? Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position in
the great line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or a
memory?
The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names of
strange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battle
line bent and straightened again. But what was really happening beyond
the barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the men live
under these new and strange conditions? What did they think? Or fear?
Or hope?
Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns and
disappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trains
came in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gone
before, they too went out and did not come back.
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