The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than
the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood,
the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man,
however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death
to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your
side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the
wounded, and speed back to a safer place.
Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of
the darkness.
"Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you."
Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us,
but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a
different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet
again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper
than doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.
The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become
individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see
them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types--we
constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of
their work and home.
"You must have met so many you never came to know their stories."
It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the
mystic; Henri of Liege; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us.
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