other said, in
speaking of a Louis XV. couch which had been borrowed from a near-by
chateau and was the pride of a regiment, "Oh! we are cave-dwellers, but
we have some of the luxuries of at least the nineteenth century."
The Major Commandant at Rethel showed me a letter from a friend
demanding "some easy chairs and a piano for his trench house," and the
Major said, "I hear they have music up on the Yser, but the French are
too close to us here!"
All that I saw of the German Red Cross leads me to believe that it is
adequate and efficient. At Rethel we saw a Red Cross train of thirty-two
cars perfectly equipped. The cars are made specially with open
corridors, so that stretchers or rubber-wheeled trucks may be rolled
from one car to another. The berths are in two tiers, much like an
American sleeping car, and each car when full holds twenty-eight men.
There is an operating car fully equipped for the most delicate and
dangerous cases; in fact, when we saw the train at Rethel it had stopped
on its way to Germany for an operation on a man's brain.
The Spirits of Mankind
By Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States
The conviction that great spiritual forces will assert
themselves at the end of the European war to enlighten the
judgment and steady the spirits of mankind was expressed by
President Wilson in an address of welcome delivered at the
Maryland annual conference of the Methodist Protestant Church
at Washington on April 8, 1915. The text of his address
appears below.
These are days of great perplexity, when a great cloud of trouble hangs
and broods over the greater part of the world. It seems as if great,
blind, material forces had been released which had for long been held in
leash and restraint. And yet underneath that you can see the strong
impulses of great ideals.
It would be impossible for men to go through what men are going through
on the battlefields of Europe and struggle through the present dark
night of their terrible struggle if it were not that they saw, or
thought that they saw, the broadening of light where the morning should
come up and believed that they were standing each on his side of the
contest for some eternal principle for right.
Then all about them, all about us, there sits the silent, waiting
tribunal which is going to utter the ultimate judgment upon this
struggle, the great tribunal of the opinion of the world; and I fancy I
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