Soldier silhouettes on our frontStidger, William L. (William Le Roy)
History
Soldier silhouettes on our front
Stidger, William L. (William Le Roy)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Young Men's Christian Associations
The brave note in the second cable gave him new spirit and new courage,
and in spite of a heavy heart he went into a canteen, and will any
wonder who read this story that he has won the undying devotion of his
entire regiment by his tireless self-sacrificing service to the
American boys?
What triumphs these are, what triumphs over sorrow and pain.
All of France is filled with these Silhouettes of Sorrow, but each has
a background of triumphant, dawning light.
There was the woman and child that I saw in the Madeleine in Paris,
both in black. They walked slowly up the steps and in through the
great doors to pray for their daddy aviator, who had been killed a year
before.
A man at the door told me that every day they come, that every day they
keep fresh the memory of their loved one.
"But why does she come so long after he is dead?" I asked.
"She comes to pray for the other aviators," he added simply.
It was a tremendous thing to me. I went into the great, beautiful
cathedral and reverently knelt beside them in love and thankfulness
that no harm had come to my own wife and baby. But the memory of that
woman's brave pilgrimage of prayer each day for a year, "for the other
aviators," the picture of the woman and child kneeling, etched its way
into my soul to remain forever.
"As I shot down through the night, falling to what I was certain was
immediate death, I had just one thought," a young aviator said, as we
sat talking in a hotel in Paris.
I said: "What was it?"
"I said to myself: 'What will the poor kiddie do without his dad?"'
Then there is that Silhouette of Sorrow that my friend brought back
from Germany, he who was on the Peace Ship Commission, and who saw a
train-load of German boys leaving a certain German town to fill in the
gaps caused by the losses at Verdun; and because this sorrow is
characteristic of the mother sorrow of the whole world, and especially
of the American mother, and because it has a note of wonderful triumph,
I tell it.
"I thought they were the hardest women in the world," he said, "for as
I watched them saying farewell to their boys there wasn't a tear.
There was laughter everywhere, shouting and smiles, as if those poor
boys were going off to school, or to a picnic, when we all knew that
they were going to certain death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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