Then there was the California boy.  I had known him before.  It was he who almost gave me a case of shell-shock.  The last time I saw him he was standing on a platform addressing a crowd of young church people in California.  And there he was, his six foot three shaking from head to foot like an old man with palsy, and stuttering every word he spoke.  He had been sent to the hospital at Amiens with a case of acute appendicitis.  The first night he was in the hospital the Germans bombed it and destroyed it.  They took him out and put him on a train for Paris.  This train had only gotten a few miles out of Amiens when the Germans shelled it and destroyed two cars.

“After that I began to shake,” he said simply.

“No wonder, man; who wouldn’t shake after that?” I said.  Then I asked him if he had had his operation yet.

“It can’t be done until I quit shaking.”

“When will you quit?” I asked, with a smile.

“Oh, we’re all getting better, much better; we’ll be out of here in a few months; they all get better; 90 per cent of us get back in the trenches.”

And that is the silver lining to this Silhouette Spiritual.  The doctors say that a very large percentage of them get back.

“We call ourselves the ‘First American Shock Troops,’” my friend from the West said with a grin.

“I guess you are ‘shock troops,’ all right.  I know one thing, and that is that you would give your folks back home a good shock if they saw you.”

Then we all laughed.  Laughter was in the air.  I have never met anywhere in France such a happy, hopeful, cheerful crowd as that bunch of shell-shocked boys.  It was contagious.  I went there to cheer them up, and I got cheered up.  I went there to give them strength, and came away stronger than when I went in.  It would cheer the hearts of all Americans to take a peep into that room; if they could see the souls back of the trembling bodies; if they could get beyond the first shock of those trembling bodies and stuttering tongues.  And, after all, that is what America must learn to do, to get beyond, and to see beyond, the wounds, into the soul of the boy; to see beyond the blinded eyes, the scarred faces, the legless and armless lads, into the glory of their new-born souls, for no boy goes through the hell of fire and suffering and wounds that he does not come out new-born.  The old man is gone from him, and a new man is born in him.  That is the great eternal compensation of war and suffering.

I have seen boys come out of battles made new men.  I have seen them go into the line sixteen-year-old lads, and come out of the trenches men.  I saw a lad who had gone through the fighting in Belleau Woods.  I talked with him in the hospital at Paris.  His face was terribly wounded.  He was ugly to look at, but when I talked with him I found a soul as white as a lily and as courageous as granite.