phrase of the cross
seemed to sing in unison with the beating of the engine of my truck:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

Suddenly out of the night crept an ambulance train, which passed my
slower and larger machine. They had no time to wait for me. They were
American boys on their errands of mercy, and the front was calling
them. I knew that something must be going on off toward the front
lines, for the rumbling of the big guns had been going on for an hour.
As these ambulances passed me--more than twenty-five of them passed as
silent ships pass in the night--that phrase kept singing: "Traveller,
hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

Then I drove a bit farther on my way, and off across a field I saw the
walls of a great hospital. It was an evacuation hospital, and I had
visited in its wards many times after a raid, when hundreds of our boys
had been brought in every night and day, with four shifts of doctors
kept busy day and night in the operating-room caring for them. As I
thought of all that I had seen in that hospital, again that singing
phrase of the crucifix at the crossroads was on my lips: "Traveller,
hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

A mile farther, and just a few feet from the road, I passed a little
"God's acre" that I knew so well. As its full meaning swept over me
there in the darkness of that night, the heartache and loneliness of
the folks at home whose American boys were lying there, some two
hundred of them, the old crucifix phrase expressed it all:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And, somehow, as I drove back by the crucifix in the darkness of the
next morning, about two o'clock, I had to stop again and with my
flash-light spell out the lettering on the cross.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that this was France speaking to America:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And when I paused in the darkness of that night and thought of the one
million and a quarter of the best manhood of France who had given their
lives for the precious things that we hold most dear: our homes, our
children, our liberty, our democracy; and when I thought that France
had saved that for us; and when I remembered the funeral processions
that I had seen every day since I had been in France, and when I
remembered the women doing the work of men, handling the baggage of
France, ploughing the fields of France; d