There is the “Light that Lies in the Soldiers’ Eyes,” of which my friend Lynn Harold Hough has written so beautifully and understandingly.  Only over here it is a different light.  It is the light of a great loneliness for home, hidden back of a light that we see in the eyes of the three soldiers in the painting “The Spirit of Seventy-Six.”  It is there.  It is here.  One sees it in the eyes of the lads who have come in out of the trenches after they have had their baptism of fire.  I have seen them come in after successfully repulsing a German raid and I have seen their eyes fairly luminous with victory, and that light says, as said the spirit of France, not only “They shall not pass,” but it says something else.  It says:  “We’ll go get ’em!  We’ll go get ’em!” That’s the light o’ war that lies in the soldiers’ eyes back of the light of home.  I verily believe that the two are close akin.  The American lad knows that the sooner we lick the Hun the sooner he’ll get back home, where he wants to be more than he wants anything else on earth.

Y. M. C. A.’s LIGHT

Then there’s the light in the Y. M. C. A. hut, and from General Pershing down to the lowest private the army knows that this is the warmest, friendliest, most home-like, most welcome light that shines out through the darkness of war.  It not only shines literally by night, but it shines by day.  I have seen some huts back of the front lines lighted by the most brilliant electricity.  Some of it is obtained from local power-plants, and some of it is made by the Y. M. C. A. Then I have seen some huts up near the lines that were lighted by old-fashioned oil-lamps.  Then I have been in Y. M. C. A. dugouts and cellars and holes in the ground, up so close to the German lines that they were shelled every day, and these have been lighted by tallow candles stuck in a bottle or in their own melted grease.  I have seen huts back of the lines away from danger of air-raids that could have their windows wide open, and I have seen the light pouring in a flood out of these windows, a constant invitation to thousands of American boys.  And again I have seen our huts in places so near the lines that the secretaries had not only to use candles but to screen their windows with a double layer of black cloth, so that not a single ray of that tiny candle might throw its beams to the watching German on the hill beyond.  I never knew before what Shakespeare meant when he said:  “How far a tiny candle throws its beams.”  But whether it has been in the more protected huts back of the lines or in the dangerous huts close to the lines, the lights in the huts are usually the only lights available for the boys, and to these lights they flock every night.  It is a Rembrandt picture that they make in the dim light of the candles sitting around the tables writing letters by candle-light.  It is their one warm, bright spot, for a great stove nearly always blazes away in the Y. M. C. A. hut, and it is the only warmth the lad knows.  Few of the billets or tents in France boast of a stove.