These are the Silhouettes of Service.

VIII

SILHOUETTES OF SORROW

I wondered at his hold on the hearts of the boys in a certain hospital in France.  It was a strange thing.  I went through the hospital with him and it seemed to me, judging by the conversation with the boys in the hundreds of cots, that he had just done something for a boy, or he was just in the process of doing something, or he was just about to do something.

They called him “daddy.”

All day long I wondered at his secret, for he was so unlike any man I had seen in France in the way he had won the hearts of the boys.  I was curious to know.  Something in his eyes made me think of Lincoln.  They had a look like Lincoln in their depths.

That night when I was about to leave I blunderingly stumbled on his secret.  About the only ornament in his bare pine room in the hut was a picture on the desk.  I seized on it immediately, for next to a sweet-faced baby about the finest thing on earth to look at is a boy between five and twelve.  And here were two, dressed in plaid suits, with white collars, tousled hair, clean, fine American boys.

I exclaimed as I picked the picture up: 

“What a fine pair of lads!”

Then I knew that I had, unwittingly, stumbled into his secret, for a look of infinite pain swept over his face.

“They are both dead.  Last August wife called me on the phone and said that something awful had happened to the boys.  They were all we had, and I hurried home.

“They had gone out on a Boy Scout picnic.  The older had gone in swimming in the river and had gotten beyond his depth.  The younger went in after him and both were drowned.”

“I’m sorry I brought it back,” I said humbly.

He didn’t notice what I said, but went on.

“Wife and I were broken-hearted.  There didn’t seem much to live for.  We had lost all.  Then came this Y. M. C. A. work, and we thought that we would like to come over here and do for all the boys in the army what we could not do for our own.  And now wife and I are here, and every time I do something for a wounded boy in this hospital, I feel as if I were serving my own dear lads.”

“And you are,” I said.  “And if the mothers and fathers of America know that men and women of your type are here looking after their lads it will give them a new sense of comfort and you will be serving them also.”

“And my wife,” he added.  “You know the boys up at ——­ call her ’The Woman with the Sandwiches and Sympathy.’  She got her name because one night a drunken soldier staggered into the hut and asked for her.  He didn’t remember her name, but she had darned his socks, she had written letters for him, she had mothered him, she had tried to help him.  They wanted to put the poor lad out, but he insisted upon seeing my wife.  Finally, in desperation, seeing that he couldn’t think of her name, he said, ‘Wan’ see that woman wif sandwiches and sympathy,’ and after that the name stuck.”