After dinner we walked amid the red poppies in the great lawn that was the crowning feature of that white-stone home.  On the walls of the ancient house grew the most wonderful roses that I have ever seen anywhere, not excepting California.  Great white roses, so large and fragrant that they seemed unreal, delicately moulded red roses, which unfolded like a baby’s lips, climbed those ancient stone walls.  The younger woman cared for them herself, and was engaged in that task of love even before we went away.

I said to her, in what French I could command:  “They are the most beautiful roses I have ever seen.”

“Even in your own beautiful America?” she asked with a smile.

“Yes, more beautiful even than in my own America.”

“Yes,” she said, “they are most beautiful, but they are more than that; they are full of hope for me.  They are my promise that I shall see him some time again.  They come back each spring.  He loved them and cared for them when he was alive.  Even on his leave in 1915 he gloried in them.  And when they come back each spring they seem to come to give me promise that I shall see him again.”

Then I translated Oxenham’s verses about the roses for her.  The translation was poor, but she caught the idea, and her face beamed with a new light, and she said:  “Ah, yes, it is as I believe, that the good God who still makes the beautiful roses, he will not take him away from me forever.”

I never read Oxenham’s verse now that I do not see that little cottage in Brittany that has sheltered the same family for centuries; twined about with great red and white roses; and the old mother and the young mother and the little lonely girl.

  “Yet our hope in Him reposes
  Who in war-time still makes roses.”

Another time, down on the Toul front lines, I had this thought forced home by a strange scene.  It was in mid-March and for three days a heavy blizzard had been blowing.  I, who had lived in California for several years, wondered at this blizzard and revelled in it, although I had had to drive amid its fury, sometimes creeping along at a snail’s pace, without lights, down near the front lines.  It was cruelly cold and hard for those of us who were in the “truck gang.”

One night during this blizzard, which blew with such fury as I have never seen before, we were lost.  At one time we were headed directly for the German lines, which were close, but an American sentry stopped us before we had gone very far, demanding in stern tones:  “Where are youse guys goin’ that direction?”

I replied:  “To Toul.”

“To Toul!  You’re going straight toward the Boche lines.  Turn around.  You’re the third truck that’s got lost in this blizzard.  Back that opposite way is your direction.”

The morning after it had cleared it was worth all the discomfort to see the hills and fields of France.  One group of hills which I had heard were the most heavily fortified in all France, loomed like two huge sentinels before the city.  The Germans knew this also, and military experts say that that is the reason why they did not try to reach Paris by this route in the beginning of the war.