“it is rather for us to be here dedicated....”

out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden sun, i came suddenly on the young american soldier, lying dead, his face turned toward the bois de belleau. he was the stillest thing in all the silent countryside, ghostly quiet after the four-days’ din of battle, now gone forward and thundering on the horizon. compared to his stillness, the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they were, seemed quivering conscious life; the trees, although half-shattered by the shell-fire, fluttered their bright leaves, vividly alive; the weeds by the roadside vibrated in triumph. they were wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they had survived. they were alive. only the soldier had not survived.

all men go a long journey to meet their death, through many days and months and years. but[134] he and his comrades had gone a longer than any man before them. they had passed through all those days and months and years; and more than that, across unending miles of those other wheat-fields in a far country and across the unending miles of the ocean they saw for the first time; but far more than that, they had crossed incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of the tyranny of old, fixed ideas.

he had come a long journey, he had trod a new road, he was fighting a new fight, this soldier who had turned his back on the limitations of the past, who was making forward into the future with all the strength and faith of his young manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and lay down forever in a wheat-field of france.

there he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, having done his best.

being still alive, and so not permitted to lie down by him to rest, i left him, and returned to a great city, any great city—all great cities everywhere in the world being the same.

i stood before the door of a shop. i saw an old, thin, work-deformed woman cowering before[135] a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood over her, angrily shouting at her that she had not sufficiently burnished the brass hinges of the great glass doors. with the rich abundance of the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, i saw her cowering before him, all her sacred human dignity stripped from her by her need for food, by the fear of more hunger than even she could endure.

i saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, strained together into a cohesion by steel bands, with a bloated, flabby face covered with red and white. small glass-like pieces of white stone were thrust into the pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed on her protuberant bosom, on her puffed, useless fingers. with the roar of the distant battle still in my ears, i heard her saying, “the war is lasting too long! lucette tells me that it’s impossible for her to get the right shade of silk for my corset; the only coiffeur who understands my hair has been sent to the front; and i have not had a bonbon in ten days.”

i saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, shaking with alcoholism, rotten with disease, livid[136] with hunger, undone with hopelessness, flung on a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. only the palsied trembling of his dirty hands showed that he lived. but with the awful odor of real death still in my nostrils, i perceived that he was alive, while the strong young soldier was dead.

i saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, with white fine linen and smooth black broad-cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deigning to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure that they would give way before the costliness of his ring and pin.

in his soft, white hands he held a newly printed newspaper which, open at the news from the stock exchange, he read with an expression of eager rapacity. on his way stood a woman in all the fleshly radiance of her youth, with some of the holiness of youth still left on her painted mouth. she, looking at him hungrily, desperately, forced his eyes up to meet hers. with the glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, i saw the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, i saw an instant’s sickness in hers go out, quenched by the bravado of despair.

[137]oh, american soldier, lying still in the wheat-field of france, did you come so far a journey to meet your death in order that all this might continue?

“let us here highly resolve that all these dead shall not have died in vain....”