is war then, until he hears the unmistakable beat of
the Hun plane overhead and sees the flash of one, two, three, four,
five, six, ten, twelve, fifteen bombs break in a single field a few
hundred yards away, and the driver remarks: "I knew we'd have a raid
tonight. It's a great night for the Boche!"
STARLIGHT AT FRONT
Then there is the starlight on No Man's Land, for the starlight is a
part of the lights o' war just as are the moonlight and the star-shells
and the little flash-lights and the range-finders and the bursting
shells and bombs. But there are other more significant lights o' war.
There is the "Light that Lies in the Soldiers' Eyes," of which my
friend Lynn Harold Hough has written so beautifully and
understandingly. Only over here it is a different light. It is the
light of a great loneliness for home, hidden back of a light that we
see in the eyes of the three soldiers in the painting "The Spirit of
Seventy-Six." It is there. It is here. One sees it in the eyes of
the lads who have come in out of the trenches after they have had their
baptism of fire. I have seen them come in after successfully repulsing
a German raid and I have seen their eyes fairly luminous with victory,
and that light says, as said the spirit of France, not only "They shall
not pass," but it says something else. It says: "We'll go get 'em!
We'll go get 'em!" That's the light o' war that lies in the soldiers'
eyes back of the light of home. I verily believe that the two are
close akin. The American lad knows that the sooner we lick the Hun the
sooner he'll get back home, where he wants to be more than he wants
anything else on earth.
Y. M. C. A.'s LIGHT
Then there's the light in the Y. M. C. A. hut, and from General
Pershing down to the lowest private the army knows that this is the
warmest, friendliest, most home-like, most welcome light that shines
out through the darkness of war. It not only shines literally by
night, but it shines by day. I have seen some huts back of the front
lines lighted by the most brilliant electricity. Some of it is
obtained from local power-plants, and some of it is made by the Y. M.
C. A. Then I have seen some huts up near the lines that were lighted
by old-fashioned oil-lamps. Then I have been in Y. M. C. A. dugouts
and cellars and holes in the ground, up so close to the German lines
that they were shelled every day, and these have been lighted by tallow
candles stuck in a b
|