“Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

Suddenly out of the night crept an ambulance train, which passed my slower and larger machine.  They had no time to wait for me.  They were American boys on their errands of mercy, and the front was calling them.  I knew that something must be going on off toward the front lines, for the rumbling of the big guns had been going on for an hour.  As these ambulances passed me—­more than twenty-five of them passed as silent ships pass in the night—­that phrase kept singing:  “Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

Then I drove a bit farther on my way, and off across a field I saw the walls of a great hospital.  It was an evacuation hospital, and I had visited in its wards many times after a raid, when hundreds of our boys had been brought in every night and day, with four shifts of doctors kept busy day and night in the operating-room caring for them.  As I thought of all that I had seen in that hospital, again that singing phrase of the crucifix at the crossroads was on my lips:  “Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

A mile farther, and just a few feet from the road, I passed a little “God’s acre” that I knew so well.  As its full meaning swept over me there in the darkness of that night, the heartache and loneliness of the folks at home whose American boys were lying there, some two hundred of them, the old crucifix phrase expressed it all: 

“Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

And, somehow, as I drove back by the crucifix in the darkness of the next morning, about two o’clock, I had to stop again and with my flash-light spell out the lettering on the cross.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that this was France speaking to America: 

“Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?”

And when I paused in the darkness of that night and thought of the one million and a quarter of the best manhood of France who had given their lives for the precious things that we hold most dear:  our homes, our children, our liberty, our democracy; and when I thought that France had saved that for us; and when I remembered the funeral processions that I had seen every day since I had been in France, and when I remembered the women doing the work of men, handling the baggage of France, ploughing the fields of France; doing the work of men because the men were all either killed or at the front; when I remembered the little fatherless children that I had seen all over France, whose sad eyes looked up into mine everywhere I went; and when I remembered the young widows (every woman of France seems to be in black); and when I remembered the thousands of blind men and boys that I had seen being led helplessly about the streets of the cities and villages of France; and when I remembered that lonely wife that one Sunday afternoon in Toul I had watched go and kneel beside a little mound and place flowers there—­the dates on the stone of which I later saw were “March, 1916,” then I cried aloud in the darkness as I realized the tremendous sacrifice that France has made for the world, as well as England and Belgium.  “No, France!  No, England!  No, little Belgium! this traveller has never seen so great a grief as thine!”