Another I know lived in a dugout for three months, under shell fire
every day. One day a shell took off the end of the old chateau in
which he was serving the men. His dugout was in the cellar. But he
did not leave. Another day another shell took off the other end of the
chateau, but he did not leave. He had no other place to go, and the
boys couldn't leave, so why should he go just because he could leave if
he wished? That was the way he looked at it. One man whom I
interviewed in Paris, a Baptist clergyman, crawled four hundred yards
at the Chateau-Thierry battle with a young lieutenant, dragging a
litter with them across a stubble wheat-field under a rain of
machine-gun bullets and shells, in plain view of the Germans, and
rescued a wounded colonel. When they brought him back they had to
crawl the four hundred yards again, pushing the litter before them inch
by inch. It took them two hours to get across that field. A piece of
shrapnel went through the secretary's shoulder. He is nearly sixty
years of age, but he did not stop when a service called him that meant
the almost certain loss of his own life.

I know another secretary, Doctor Dan Poling, a clergyman, and Pest, a
physical director, who carried a wounded German, who had two legs
broken, through a barrage of German shells across a field to safety.

But all the Silhouettes of Service are not in the front lines.

There are two divisions to the army. They used to be "The Zone of
Advance" and "The Zone of the Rear." Now they call the second division
"The Services of Supplies." All the men who are not in the actual
fighting belong to "The Services of Supplies."

"How many men does it take to keep one pilot in the machine flying out
over those waters to guard the transports in?" I asked the young ensign
in charge of a seaplane station.

"Twenty-eight," he replied. "There are twenty-eight men back of every
machine and every pilot."

The service that these men render, although it is hard for them to see
it, is just as real and just as heroic as the service of those in the
front lines. The boys in "The Services of Supplies" are eager to get
up front. I have had the joy of making them see in their huts and
camps that their service is supremely important.

One cannot tell what service is more important.

When I landed at Newport News, the first sound that I heard was the
machine-gun hammering of thousands of riveters building ships. I know
how v