One who has lived and worked in France has silhouette memories of funeral processions standing out in sombre blackness against a lurid nation.  He has memories of funeral trains in little villages and in great cities; he has memories of brave men standing as doorkeepers in hotels, with arms gone, with crosses for bravery on their breasts, but somehow the cloud of sorrow is always fringed with gold and silver.  He has memories of funeral services in Notre Dame and the Madeleine, and in little towns all over France, but in and around them all there is somewhere the glory of sunlight, of hope, of courage.  Indeed, one cannot have silhouettes, even of sorrow, if there is no background of light and hope.

For we know that even in war-time God “still makes roses,” as John Oxenham, the English poet, tells us: 

  “Man proposes—­God disposes;
  Yet our hope in Him reposes
  Who in war-time still makes roses.”

John Oxenham, one of the outstanding poets of the war, wrote this verse, and for me it has been a sort of a motto of faith during my service in France.  I have quoted it everywhere I have spoken, and it has sung its way into my heart, like a benediction with its comfort and its assurance.

It has been surprising, too, the way the boys have grasped at it.  I have quoted it to them privately, in groups, and in great crowds down on the line, and back in the rest-camps, and in the ports, and everywhere I have quoted it I have had many requests to give copies of it to the boys.  I quoted it once in a negro hut, hesitating before I did so lest they should not appreciate it enough to make quoting it excusable.  But I took a chance.

When the service was over a long line of intelligent-looking negro boys waited for me.  I thought that they just wanted to shake hands, but much to my astonishment most of them wanted to know if I would give them a copy of that verse, and so I was kept busy for half an hour writing off copies of that brief word of faith.

One never quite knows all that this verse means until he has been in France and has seen the suffering, the heartache, the loneliness, the mud, and dirt and hurt; the wounds and pain and death which are everywhere.

Then he turns from all the suffering to find a blood-red poppy blooming in the field behind him; or a million of them covering a green field like a great blanket.  These poppies are exactly like our golden California poppies.  Like them they grow in the fields and along the hedges; even covering the unsightly railroad-tracks, as if they would hide the ugly things of life.

I thought to myself:  “They look as if they had once been our golden California poppies, but that in these years of war every last one of them had been dipped in the blood of those brave lads who have died for us, and forever after shall they be crimson in memory of these who have given so much for humanity.”

One day in early June I was driving through Brittany along the coast of the Atlantic.  On the road we passed many old-fashioned men, and women in their little white bonnets and their black dresses.