And so it is all over France; where I have worked in some twenty hospitals—­from the first-aid dressing-stations back through the evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals—­and have found that the reaction of our boys to wounds and suffering is always a spiritual reaction.  I know as I know no other thing, that the boys of America are to come back, wounded or otherwise, a better crowd of men than they went away.  They are men reborn, and when they come back, when it’s “over, over there,” there is to be a nation reborn because of the leaven that is within their souls.

V

SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE

During the last year there has come into French art a new era of the silhouette.  In every art store in Paris one sees wonderful silhouettes which tell the story of the horror of the Hun better than any words can paint it, and when one attempts to paint it he must attempt it in word silhouettes.

The silhouette catches the picture better than color.  Gaunt, naked, ruined cathedrals, homes, towers, and forests are better pictured in black silhouettes than any other way.  There is nothing much left in some places in France but silhouettes.

Those who have seen Rheims know that the best reproduction of its ruins has been conveyed by the simple silhouette of the artist.  There it stands outlined against the sky.  Rheims that was once the wonder of the world is now naked ruins, tottering walls, with its towers still standing, looming against the sky like tottering trees.  And when, during the past year, the walls fell, they: 

  “Left a lonesome place against the sky”

of all the world.

The church at Albert was like that.  Only a silhouette can describe or picture it.  There it stood against the sky by day and night, with the figure on its top leaning.  The old legend of the soldiers that when the figure of the Virgin fell to the earth the war would end has been dissipated, for during the last drive that figure fell, and the tower with it.  But forever (although it has fallen to dust and debris, because of descriptions we have seen of it) it shall stand out in our memories like a lonely, toppling tree against a crimson sunset!

Every day on the Toul line we used to drive through a village that had been shelled until it was in ruins.  Only the tower and the walls of a beautiful little church remained.  Every other house in the village was razed to the ground.  Nothing else remained.

There it stands to this day, for when I saw it last in June it was still standing as it was in January.  Every evening about sunset we used to drive down that way, taking supplies to the front-line huts.  Many things stand out in one’s memory of a certain road over which he drives night after night and day after day.  There is the cross at the forks of the roads.  There is the old monastery, battered