“It isn’t a bit picturesque to give until it hurts, but it helps a lot.  I saw Sarah Bernhardt the other day in a wonderful little play where she’s a French boy, who dies in the end—­and she dies, exquisitely, with the flag of France in her arms—­the faded, lovely flag—­I shall never forget.  The tears ran down my cheeks so that I couldn’t see, but her voice, so faint and clear, still rings in my ears—­

“If she had died clutching a Liberty Bond or wearing a Red Cross button, it would have seemed like burlesque.  Yet there are men and women who are going without bread and butter to buy Liberty Bonds, and who are buying them not as a safe investment, as rich men buy, but because the boys need the money.  And there ought to be poems written and statues erected to commemorate some of the sacrifices for the sake of the Red Cross.

“Yet I think that, in a way, we have not emphasized enough the picturesque quality of this war, not on this side.  They do it in France—­they worship their great flyers, their great generals, their crack regiments, everything has a personality, they are tender with their shattered cathedrals as if something human had been hurt, and the result is a quickening on the part of every individual, a flaming patriotism which as yet we have not felt.  We don’t worship anything, we don’t all of us know the words of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’; fancy a Frenchman not knowing the words of the ‘Marseillaise’ or an Englishman forgetting ‘God Save the King.’  We don’t shout and sing enough, we don’t cry enough, we don’t feel enough—­and that’s all there is to it.  If we were hot for the triumph of democracy, there would be no chance of victory for the Hun.  Perhaps as the war comes nearer, we shall feel more, and every day it is coming nearer—­”

It was very near, indeed.  Thousands of those gray sheep were lying dead on the plains of Picardy—­the Allies fought with their backs to the wall—­Americans who had swaggered, secure in the prowess of Uncle Sam, swaggered no longer, and pondered on the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.

Slowly the nation waked to what was before it.  In America now lay the hope of the world.  The Wolf must be trapped, the sheep saved in spite of themselves, those poor sheep, driven blindly to slaughter.

The General was not quite sure that they were sheep, or that they were being driven.  He held, rather, that they knew what they were about—­and were not to be pitied.

Teddy, considering this gravely, went back to previous meditations, and asked if he prayed for his enemies.

“Bless my soul,” said the old gentleman, “why should I?”

“Well, Mother says we must, and then some day they’ll stop and say they are sorry—­”

The General chuckled, “Your mother is optimistic.”

“What’s ’nopt’mistic?”

“It means always believing that nice things will happen.”

“Don’t you believe that nice things will happen?”