“This is no fiction,” said the French soldier to me. “This is fact. And this is what would happen again in a few years if we made peace too soon. Why not end it for all time now? We men are ready to give our lives. We embrace the earth when we fall, for the sacrifice of a few lives now is nothing to the horrors that are in store for our children to come, unless we win, really win, this war.” I said: “I will tell the American people what you have said, and what I know to be true, for I have seen something of this war, and I know what might happen in my country unless we win a complete victory.” Because I am particularly concerned lest our women unwittingly weaken the least bit the morale and the fighting spirit of our soldiers, I am going to tell them what I have seen. My only son, I have said before, is a soldier. He is at the front. Yet, after what I have seen of this war, I would never speak of peace to him. I don’t want him to think of peace. I want him to think of fighting. Since this war began, nearly two million people, not fighters, but women and children and men too old and infirm to fight, have been driven in wretchedness from their homes. This in France alone. We know what happened in Belgium, in Serbia, in Roumania and Poland. Armenia? Words fail in describing what happened there. I have seen only France, and I can speak only of France. Two million French people have fled before fire and sword. But that isn’t anything very terrible, by comparison. To lose your home and everything you possess is a bearable thing--by comparison. On a Sunday soon after the great spring battle began I spent the day in a railroad station at a junction where hundreds of trains rushed ceaselessly to the north bearing soldiers and munitions, and to the south with wounded men, refugees and broken guns and airplanes. Many refugees were fed and comforted by the French Red Cross at the station that day. It was my privilege to help a little those noble French women. I filled hundreds of cups with coffee, strong and hot, and I helped to feed the exhausted who could not even stand up at the counter where coffee and sandwiches were served. We literally fed them, holding the food to their lips. There was one old woman--perhaps she was not really old, but her sufferings had emaciated her and seamed her face with wrinkles--who was my special care for an hour. She had to be given brandy before she could sit up, and she had to be fed hot milk from a spoon, like a baby. She was almost dead. Another woman, her neighbor in the ruined and violated village that once was their home, told me in quick whispers that old woman’s story.