The last time I saw this cross was by night.  I had seen it first at night, and fitting it was that I should see it last at night.  There was a terrible bombardment down the lines.  Hundreds of American boys had been killed.  One was wounded who was a son of one of the foremost Americans.  News of the fight had been coming in to us all day long.  Night came and “runners” were still bringing in the gruesome details.  The ambulances were running in a continuous procession.  We had seen things that day and night that made our hearts sick.  We had seen American boys white and unconscious.  We had seen every available room in the great evacuation hospital crowded.  We had been told that a hundred surgical cases were in the hospital, mostly shrapnel wounds, and that every available doctor and nurse was working night and day.

We had seen, under one snow-covered canvas, six boys who had been killed by one shell early that morning—­boys that the night before we had talked with down in a front-line hut—­boys who had been killed in their billet in one room.  We had seen a captain come staggering into our hut wet to the skin, soaked with blood, his hair dishevelled, his face haggard.  He had been fighting since three o’clock that morning.  He had been shell-shocked, and had been sent into the hospital.

“My God!” he cried, “I saw every officer in my company killed.  First it was my first lieutenant.  They got him in the head.  Then about ten o’clock I saw my second lieutenant fall.  Then early in the afternoon my top-sergeant got a bayonet, and a hand-grenade got a group of my non-commissioned officers.  Half of my boys are gone.”

Then he sat down and we got him some hot chocolate.  This seemed to revive his spirits, and he said:  “But, thank God, we licked them!  We licked them at their own game!  We got them six to one, and drove them back!  No Man’s Land is thick with their beastly bodies.  They are hanging on the wires out there like trapped rabbits!”

Then the thoughts of his own officers came back.

“My God!  Now we know what war means.  We’ve been playing at war up to this time.  Now we’ve got to suffer!  Then we’ll know what it all means.”  He was half-delirious, we could see, and sent for an ambulance.

As I drove home that night I passed the crossroads crucifix.  This time I needed no lights to guide me.  The whole horizon was alight with bursting shells and Very lights.  Long before I got to it I could see the gaunt form of the cross reaching its black but comforting arms up against the background of lurid light along the front where I knew that American men were dying for me.  The picture of that wayside cross, looming against the lurid light of battle, shall never die in my memory.

It was the silhouette of France and America suffering together, a silhouette standing out against a livid horizon of fire.

I needed no tiny pocket search-light to read the words on the cross.  They had already burned their way into my heart and into the hearts of that whole division of American soldiers, that division which has since so distinguished itself at Belleau Woods!  But now America has a new understanding of the meaning of that sentence, for America, too, is suffering, and she is sacrificing.