More than a hundred Y. M. C. A. men gassed and wounded to date, and more than six killed.  One friend of mine stepped down into his cellar one morning, got a full breath of gas, and was dead in two minutes.  There had been a gas-raid the day before, and the gas had remained in the cellar.  Another I know stayed in his hut and served his men even though six shell fragments came through the hut while he was doing it.  Another I know lived in a dugout for three months, under shell fire every day.  One day a shell took off the end of the old chateau in which he was serving the men.  His dugout was in the cellar.  But he did not leave.  Another day another shell took off the other end of the chateau, but he did not leave.  He had no other place to go, and the boys couldn’t leave, so why should he go just because he could leave if he wished?  That was the way he looked at it.  One man whom I interviewed in Paris, a Baptist clergyman, crawled four hundred yards at the Chateau-Thierry battle with a young lieutenant, dragging a litter with them across a stubble wheat-field under a rain of machine-gun bullets and shells, in plain view of the Germans, and rescued a wounded colonel.  When they brought him back they had to crawl the four hundred yards again, pushing the litter before them inch by inch.  It took them two hours to get across that field.  A piece of shrapnel went through the secretary’s shoulder.  He is nearly sixty years of age, but he did not stop when a service called him that meant the almost certain loss of his own life.

I know another secretary, Doctor Dan Poling, a clergyman, and Pest, a physical director, who carried a wounded German, who had two legs broken, through a barrage of German shells across a field to safety.

But all the Silhouettes of Service are not in the front lines.

There are two divisions to the army.  They used to be “The Zone of Advance” and “The Zone of the Rear.”  Now they call the second division “The Services of Supplies.”  All the men who are not in the actual fighting belong to “The Services of Supplies.”

“How many men does it take to keep one pilot in the machine flying out over those waters to guard the transports in?” I asked the young ensign in charge of a seaplane station.

“Twenty-eight,” he replied.  “There are twenty-eight men back of every machine and every pilot.”

The service that these men render, although it is hard for them to see it, is just as real and just as heroic as the service of those in the front lines.  The boys in “The Services of Supplies” are eager to get up front.  I have had the joy of making them see in their huts and camps that their service is supremely important.

One cannot tell what service is more important.

When I landed at Newport News, the first sound that I heard was the machine-gun hammering of thousands of riveters building ships.  I know how vital that service is to the boys “over there.”  They could not live without the ships.