nt before, and what he said sounded
Christian. It sounded like man's talk to me. It was the dream of the
Christ I knew. It was the dream of the prophets of old. It was
Tennyson's dream. Such a dream will not die from the earth, and men
will just keep on dreaming it until some day it will come true, for--

"Man proposes--God disposes;
Yet my hope in Him reposes,
Who in war-time still makes roses."

The white and crimson roses of that little cottage in Brittany, the
quiet and peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne d'Arc in the village
of Domremy; the blooming of a billion red poppies in the fields of
France; the blanketing of the earth with a covering of white snow
sufficient to hide the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give
promise of the God who, in the end, when he has given man every chance
to redeem himself, and who, even amid cruel wars "still makes roses,"
will finally bring to pass "peace on earth; good-will to men."

"_Somewhere in France_."

IX

SILHOUETTES OF SUFFERING

All night long a group of Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. men and women had
been feeding the refugees from Amiens. There were two thousand of them
in one basement room of the Gare du Nord. They had not eaten for
forty-eight hours. Most of them were little children, old men, and
women of all ages.

Two hundred or more of them had been in the hands of the Germans for
two years, and when a few days before it came time for the Germans to
open their second big Somme drive, they had driven these women and
little girls out ahead of them, saying: "Go back to the French now, we
do not want you any longer."

For two days and nights these refugees had tramped the roads of France
without food, many of them carrying little babies in their arms, all of
them weary and sick near unto death.

The little children gripped your heart. As you handed them food and
saw their little claw-like hands clutch at it, and as you saw them
devour it like starved animals, the while clutching at a dirty but
much-loved doll, somehow you could not see for the mists in your eyes
as you walked up and down the narrow aisles of that crowded basement
pouring out chocolate and handing out food. The things you saw every
minute in that room hung a veil over your eyes, and you were afraid all
the while that in your blinding of tears you would step on some
sleeping, starving child, who was lying on the cold floor in utter
exhaustion, regardless of food.