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

The white and crimson roses of that little cottage in Brittany, the quiet and peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne d’Arc in the village of Domremy; the blooming of a billion red poppies in the fields of France; the blanketing of the earth with a covering of white snow sufficient to hide the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give promise of the God who, in the end, when he has given man every chance to redeem himself, and who, even amid cruel wars “still makes roses,” will finally bring to pass “peace on earth; good-will to men.”

“Somewhere in France.”

IX

SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING

All night long a group of Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. men and women had been feeding the refugees from Amiens.  There were two thousand of them in one basement room of the Gare du Nord.  They had not eaten for forty-eight hours.  Most of them were little children, old men, and women of all ages.

Two hundred or more of them had been in the hands of the Germans for two years, and when a few days before it came time for the Germans to open their second big Somme drive, they had driven these women and little girls out ahead of them, saying:  “Go back to the French now, we do not want you any longer.”

For two days and nights these refugees had tramped the roads of France without food, many of them carrying little babies in their arms, all of them weary and sick near unto death.

The little children gripped your heart.  As you handed them food and saw their little claw-like hands clutch at it, and as you saw them devour it like starved animals, the while clutching at a dirty but much-loved doll, somehow you could not see for the mists in your eyes as you walked up and down the narrow aisles of that crowded basement pouring out chocolate and handing out food.  The things you saw every minute in that room hung a veil over your eyes, and you were afraid all the while that in your blinding of tears you would step on some sleeping, starving child, who was lying on the cold floor in utter exhaustion, regardless of food.

One woman especially attracted me.  I noticed her time and time again as I walked past her with food.  She was lying on her back on the floor, with nothing under her, her arms thrown back over her head, a child in her arms, or rather, lying against her breast asleep.  She looked like an educated, cultured woman.  Her features were beautiful, but she looked as if she had passed through death and hell in suffering.  I asked her several times as I passed by if she wouldn’t have some food, and each time she gave some to her baby but took none herself.  She could hardly lift her body from the stone basement to feed the child, and feeling that the thing that she needed most herself was food, I urged her to eat, but she would not.