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.

"I felt like cursing their indifference to the common impulses of
motherhood. I watched a thousand mothers and women as that train
started, and I didn't see a tear. They stood waving their hands and
smiling until the train was out of sight. I turned in disgust to walk
away when a woman near me fainted, and I caught her as she fell. Then
a low moan went up all over that station platform. It was as if those
mothers moaned as one. There was no hysteria, just a low moan that
swept over them. I saw dozens of them sink to the floor unconscious.
They had kept their grief to themselves until their lads had gone.
They had sent their boys away with a smile, and had kept their
heartache buried until those lads had departed."

I think that this is