century houses. They are interesting for artists and archæologists and architects; but as for living, well, live in a hotel.

About the middle of September what proved to be the last big allied drive began, and the cry went up in Red Cross circles, "Refugees to the rear and American soldiers to the front." Of course, recognizing the fundamental rule of Red Cross, I gladly went forward into the service of our American boys in the hospitals. I am not going to say anything in detail about the weeks and weeks of this work.

The Spirit of Sacrifice

It is almost impossible to add anything to what has been said here tonight about our boys. Yet I feel that no one dare miss an opportunity to say everything that can be said about our boys, their marvelous unselfishness, their glorious attachment to home and country, their beautiful spirit of self-sacrifice, their marvelous self-obliteration and abnegation, their splendid humor which carried them through trial after trial. I am not indulging in rhetorical exaggeration, for those who have been over there know only too well that it is impossible to exaggerate what those men were. They made every one of us everlastingly proud that they were born under the Stars and Stripes, prouder than ever to carry that flag in our buttonhole, eager to burn it upon our hearts, not because of what we did, but because of what those men did.

They were not common men. There is no such thing as a common American. They were officers and enlisted men, all one in the presence of a heroic task, all one in their consecration to the common ideal. One young officer said to me, "We are taught how to go over the top, but no one teaches us how to lay in a hospital and suffer." They lay there bearing hideous wounds upon their bodies with the fortitude of stoics and the joy of saints. They took forty-seven pieces of shrapnel out of one poor lad's limbs. Another-I remember—was "going west" as rapidly as possible. I told him who I was and asked him what I could do for him. He was a poor Jewish immigrant lad, if you will. He said, "Write to my mother not to feel sorry. I am glad I did it for my country." He had been but a few years over here; he had come over to America to escape oppression overseas. He had earned his pitiable living in the tailoring trade; yet, poor as he was, stranger that he was, he was glad he did it for America. I am sure his heartbroken mother will not be sorry because he did it for his country. That was the spirit that moved them all. And I want to say the most beautiful souls with whom I came in contact were the mountaineer boys from the Carolinas and Tennessee. Many

of them from there could not read or write. Many a time I have written their letters and they put a mark after the signature-letters written to their mothers or their sweethearts. One of them said, "You have a sweetheart?" I said, "Yes, I married her." "Well," he said, "you know how you used to write to her, and that is the way I want to write." Their innate gentleness brought joy to everyone who came in contact with them. I shudder to think of the tragedy of their neglected lives in America; I glory in their devotion and their love.

The boys were very grateful for everything that was done for them. Sick as they were, they did not want to be waited upon. They were anxious to be of service to others and not to be served. Day by day as the nurses stood by their bedsides they learned to love those boys. Many a woman who had been unsparing of herself in her strenuous work apologized with tears in her sleep-weary eyes for having lost one of those boys. She felt she had no right to lose life. She wanted to send them home to dear ones. Her own conscience certainly gave her assurance it was no fault of hers, but she had grown so attached to her boys that she thought she owed the nation an apology for having lost even one of them in the unequal struggle with death. Glorious women! Glorious men!

Kindred Across the Seas

There were not many happy incidents in my whole stay over there, but one of the most happy was meeting the British, for my work lay entirely within the British zone. The more I saw of them the more I felt that we had been estranged by a vicious propaganda: that America had not done justice to their virtues and their manhood. I came to feel that the Anglo-American alliance was not mere oratory, but was founded in realities of a common past and a common ideal. In the years to come, if we do not hang together I am afraid we are going to hang separately. If we do not stick by those who are our kin in language and blood, kin in all that makes up the essentials of our civilization, both of us are going to pay the price of failure in our great opportunity. (Applause.) I only hope we will not allow the petty criticism that comes back across the seas from men who did not take the trouble to understand to influence us. The Britisher is difficult to understand. He is not a slap-you-on-the-back type of man. He is slow to begin, but, once he has opened up, there is no limit to his good fellowship or to his comradeship. I never met a truer set of men than the group of British officers and men with whom I worked from time to time. We not only worked together; we lived together.

After the armistice had been signed, and fortunately hospital work experienced a rapid decline, I was again transferred to the Bureau of Civilian Affairs. Naturally I left Rouen with many a heartache, for one learns to love the old place and the work one does must necessarily become a part of oneself.

In the Occupied Territory

After a few days of desultory activity at Boulogne, one day I was asked: "Will you go up to Maubeuge? We are going to try a new thing—a combination British-American unit." I did not hesitate. Our center would be in the very heart of the occupied territory. The need was great and I felt the opportunity to see and to do. I had already seen much of the land of northern France, along the old battle lines. In fact, from Calais to St. Quentin there was little I had not seen. There was a ghastly atmosphere about all that territory. The horrors of inanimate nature nor the graveyard of millions of brave men can never be forgotten. The first view horrifies; later experiences but add to one's resentment of the whole affair. I now recall one typical experience in that territory. We left Cambrai about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. A heavy fog had set in. We drove over the road from Cambrai to Arras, badly patched, which had been torn to pieces during the four years past; everything was laid low; not a living being was seen, neither man nor beast; there was not even the possibility of anything living in such a scarred and marred land. A British aviator was the only companion of my ride. He was a wonderful lad, who had spent hundreds of hours in the air. We rode in silence and when at last we reached Arras he said most sententiously, "I am glad to see that light burning. We have, thank God, passed through a land of ghosts, full of spectres." When you see the thing mile after mile, and day after day, you are tempted to cry out in protest from the very depths of your soul that such orders of things are permitted, such unspeakable horrors.

I thought I had reached the very limit of human misery traveling through the battle zone. But when later I got past it into the occupied territory, then I discovered that there were still deeper sloughs of despair. Broken souls and bodies, men and women and little children, every line of whose face spoke of fear, told a tale far more harrowing than the shattered face of inanimate nature possibly could have. Spectres walked the land, an unbroken line of refugees seeking to return to their homes. I have seen thousands of them sleep in the winter night in the open places because there was no shelter. I know they went hungry on their way because there was

not sufficient bread. The transport conditions were far worse than they had ever been during the war itself, because a double task (army and civilian) devolved upon the British army. The British Fourth Army struggled to meet the need, but felt called upon finally to ask for assistance. So the joint unit to which I have already referred was formed and proceeded to do its bit of a giant task.

Hospital Work at Maubeuge

We went to Maubeuge, which we made our headquarters. We were assigned a territory of two hundred and fifty square miles, a principality itself. We opened a little hospital for civilians as a matter of fact we took one over which had been made into a hospital by the Boches. They had done a good job in transforming a girls' seminary. But you should have seen the condition in which they left it. What we encountered in that hospital one can never forget! I will only tell you one thing. In the courtyard, heaped high, was an accumulation of hospital litter, dirty mattresses, surgical dressings, etc. The only thing anyone could do was to burn it, and for hours, while that thing burned, we dodged bullets. No doubt exists that they had been maliciously put there.

I can't tell you the conditions of the population we found in this and other nearby places. Our first job was a little boy who came to ask us for transportation so that he might return to his shattered home to die among his dear ones. Part of his skull had been shot away. He and his brother wandered about looking for medical attendance. Living corpses was about the most fitting description of the two of them. The doctors of our unit refused to send them on until we fed them. And when we gave them food they swelled up to an unnatural size. We kept them till they had regained some strength and then sent them with a careful driver to their home. The next real patient was a little four-year-old, a handsome little blonde boy. The doctors told me it would have taken exactly five minutes' time to remedy his trouble in its inception, but the Boche allowed this thing to run on months and months. He was a man child, a possible soldier and the father of soldiers. So they let him suffer; mayhap die. When I left, weeks later, he was still struggling with the grim spectre, for the brave British doctors and nurses were putting up a determined fight. Case after case flocked to us when we had hardly opened the hospital. Every case we took in the doctors would shake their heads and say, "You cannot fight those things. They are suffering from starvation, exposure and terrorization and have no reserve strength." There was no coal to speak of up in that region, little food, clothing and medical supplies.

In Terror of the Hun

I cannot forget how the people would jump off the sidewalk, some pulling off their hats and standing at attention as officers passed. I took one boy to task for it. He said: "When the Boches were here they whipped us when we failed to do so." They all had been so terrorized by the Hun that it took weeks to get their confidence; and medical men know that without confidence it is almost impossible to treat cases successfully.

I can assure you it did not take me long to distribute the food and clothing with which I was furnished by our Red Cross. And when it was distributed it seemed as though nothing had been done. I think that nothing short of governmental action can adequately meet that situation. One woman was a scrub woman at our place and I handed her a poor unbleached muslin chemise and asked her if she would take it. She said: "Will I have it? I used to have forty, and now I only have the one on my back. The Germans would commandeer everything in our cottages." There was nothing in the shape of supplies of any sort. They had only the things that they concealed. There was no food up there; I do not exaggerate― eggs two francs apiece, i. e. when you could get them. Forty cents. for one egg! Milk was scarcer than scarce. There was not even enough for the sick and for the children.

I remember one night at a little village we put up in a woman's home there. We asked her for food. We did not think we would be out over night and so had not provided ourselves. Her best was a pot of potatoes and dry bread. I took out my emergency ration, a tin of sardines, a tin of milk and some chocolate, and I thought her little boy's eyes would jump out of their sockets when he saw the unaccustomed display. I do not suppose he had seen such things for four years. I said to my driver, "Let's leave it for them." This generous boy said, "Sure; we will get plenty to eat tomorrow." It was the first food of that nature that had crossed our little host's lips in months and in years. The woman told us how her husband had been four years in the French army and she did not know whether he was alive or dead. And how they had used her little boy! He was just fourteen. When she would not do their will, they would threaten to send the boy to the salt mines, and, of course, it would have been impossible for him to go through the experience of working in the salt mines.

Despair should have filled the breasts of all of them, but they thanked God that there was a ray of hope. They lived on hope for the fifty months of the occupation; they lived on hope in their libera