I heard no laughter.  I heard no loud talking, I heard no singing; I heard only the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, and the crunching of the great motor-trucks, and the patter of horses as the officers galloped along their lines.  That army of American men knew that the job on which they were entering was not child’s play.  They knew that democracy depended upon what they did in that line.  They knew that many of them would never come back.  They knew that at last the real thing was facing them.  They were not like dumb, driven beasts.  They were men.  They were American men.  They were thinking men.  They were silent men.  They were brave men.

They were marching to their place in history unafraid, and unflinching, but thoughtful and silent.

Another Silhouette of Silence.  It was after midnight on the Toul line.  We were driving back from the front.  The earth was covered with a blanket of snow.  Everything was white.  We were moving cautiously because with the snow over everything it was hard to tell where the icy road left off and the ditches began; and those ditches were four feet deep, and a big truck is hard to get out of a hole.  Then there were no lights, for we were too near the Boche batteries.

“Halt!” rang out suddenly in the night, and a sentry stepped into the middle of the road.

I got down to see what he wanted.

“There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches to-night, and they are coming this way.  Drive carefully, for it is slippery.”

In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and passed it.  A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded down with American boys.  Their rifles were stacked in the front of the truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks.  One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers passed us.  One can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise, but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word, not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty trucks.  The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the snow.  We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a snow-covered hill and disappear.  Not a single sound of a human voice had broken the silence.

Another Silhouette of Silence:  It is an operating-room in an evacuation hospital.  The boy was brought in last night.  An operation was immediately imperative.  I had known the boy, and was there by courtesy of the major in charge of the hospital.  The boy had asked that I come.

For just one hour they worked, two skilled American surgeons, whose names, if I were to mention them, would be recognized as two of America’s greatest specialists.  France has many of them who have given up their ten-thousand-dollar fees to endure danger to save our boys.  During that hour’s stress and strain, with sweat pouring from their brows, they worked.  Now and then there was a nod to a nurse, who seemed to understand without words, and a motion of a hand, but not three words were spoken.  It made a Silhouette of Silence that saved a boy’s life.