upholstery were slashed; richly bound books were ripped; in fact, there was hardly a thing in the city left intact. The houses of the poor, in which the German privates had been billeted, were just as badly pillaged and devastated as the homes of the well-to-do. The church, grand enough for a cathedral, had not been spared. Its paintings and altars and crucifixes and stations of the cross had been ruthlessly battered and defiled. Yet even this does not tell the story-a story which cannot be told to people who respect decency-for the Germans left tokens of physical and mental obscenity in every house I visited, and I entered scores. If all hell had been let loose in a choice suburban town for half a day, it could not have put its obscene and diabolical mark on a place more unmistakably than the Germans put theirs on Château Thierry. I stood amazed that there could be so much unrelieved vileness, such organized beastliness, in the world.

This brings me to the question of how the Allied nations feel towards Germany-a question which I have been at no usual pains to study. France is the most difficult to describe. In the main the French are in the struggle to free the northern part of their land from a devouring monster. They are too busy in self-defense to indulge in moral psychology. Wherever the German foot has trod there is nothing left but ruin; not an object of art or a subject of sentiment has been spared. They are holding back a monster which is trying to ravish and rape them, and they fight with a mingled sense of fear and horror, which is shot through with a vivid consciousness of personal and national honor, innocence, and righteousness. The British are somewhat different. They have a feeling that their incomparable navy protects them, and that their land fighting is an over-plus contribution to the general cause of decency and civilization. It would not be true to say that the average Britisher hates the Germans; rather he looks upon them as an unexpectedly horrible atavism, a frightful blend of tiger, snake, and ape, an exaggerated type of Caliban, a section of the human family which has become physically, socially, and morally insane-a something repulsive, loathsome, foul, dangerous, and racially fratricidal which must be curbed at any cost. The British do not hate the German; they simply vomit lead into them whenever possible because of utter disgust. Our Americans are in another class. Thus far our knowledge of German brutality and villainy has been somewhat remote, except for the troops that have seen such sights as they and I saw together in Château Thierry and the adjacent villages and towns. Americans despise the Germans as men who do not know how to play fair or fight clean or keep the common covenants of civilization. Hence we still hold the crusading spirit. We fight as the saviors of our gallant allies, who need help after four years of struggle against prostituted science and skill. Our Army has a mission, a sacred mission, and from the officer in command down to the lowliest enlisted man there is a feeling of dedication. They are all fighting for a cause, and each is the champion of all that is fine and holy and worth-while in the world. Later, after closer contact with the Hun, something more bitter or repugnant may enter into the feelings of the Army; but the present mood is so sublime and vicarious and stern that it assures victory.

But to come back to Château Thierry. Kelland and I dropped onto a mattress in a looted and wretched bedroom and slept until morning. (This was the first of several nights through which I slept in my uniform and boots.) The battle was on a conflict which many believe to be the turning-point of the war. It was also the first time in which division after division of American fighting men were thrown into the fray. But a battle which is being waged over a front of seventy or eighty kilometers, which lasts for weeks and engages hundreds of thousands of men, cannot be described by any one correspondent. Fortunately, I am not accounted a war correspondent, and therefore may evade the main issues. After three hours' sleep in the wrecked cottage, we had breakfast in a shell-mined garden. A good breakfast it was, too-coffee, pancakes, and strips of bacon, not served with Ritz finesse, but grabbed by healthy, hungry men who were glad to eat it standing.

Just when I had finished that rough but wholesome repast a wet, muddy, disheveled, but jaunty figure in khaki hove in sight. The wings on his blouse left no doubt as to his unit. "Where in the devil am I?" he asked.

had to land in a potato-field across the river waded the stream. Must telephone back to headquarters. Where is the nearest station? Thanks, I'll be back for some coffee in a few minutes. Think I can get the machine up again later in the day. Need some gas-that's all."

He was only a boy, but self-possessed and master of himself to the utmost degree. His sang-froid was perfectly charming in the gray dawn of the morning. Divis

Then we found the Y. M. C. A. attached to the ion. Although it was only 6 A.M., every man-there were seven or eight secretaries was already up and shaved and at work. Their unit was moving to the extreme front that day, and, by rare good luck, it was a unit in which I had served as chaplain. Many of the officers knew me personally, and accepted me without question as a part of the outfit. This gave me a chance to see everything that was worth seeing in the way of war. I still had some supplies of cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate, and chewinggum left, but I was able to secure more from the Y. M. C. A. stores, which had kept contact with the moving troops. At this point I picked up Francis B. Sayre, President Wilson's son-inlaw, and E. Harold Cluett, of the Y. M. C. A. War Work Council, and under the guidance of Colonel the Division quartermaster, we started together for the sanguinary front lines. The story of our journey is altogether too gruesome to tell. As we passed along roads and through fields we saw sights which will haunt me till my dying day-dead Germans in every grotesque posture, just as they fell; an American soldier by the roadside with his head blown utterly to pieces; the abandoned arms and clothing of soldiers littered everywhere; groups of our own wounded and gassed boys, to whom we gave such comfort of cigarettes or chocolate as the medical orderlies would permit; torn battalions or decimated platoons halted for a moment and again moving into action; a well-known Yale athlete carrying out urgent and perilous tasks in the intelligence department; convoys carrying food and ammunition forward in spite of heartbreaking difficulties; and, last of all, a machinegun battalion holding the last edge of woods between the Allies and the German forces. No one could go any farther to the front than we were at that moment. We were in the van of one of the bitterest battles of the war-the fight that was to drive the Boche out of the Soissons-Rheims salient, deliver Paris, and teach the Hun once for all that America was to be the decisive factor in the struggle. In those fateful woods Sayre, Cluett, and I had a supper which will tell its own story. We ate cold roast beef (really tender), hot macaroni, boiled potatoes, bread and jam, and coffee. It was all well cooked and we had more than enough. Will the dear, coddled, secure, and war-tax growling American at home remember that this is how we take care of our fighting men who are within range of German machine guns and rifles? Of course there are instances where American troops outrun their field kitchen and suffer-I found men who had not seen food for forty-eight hours during the awful stress of an attack-but such cases are not the rule.

We gave away our supplies to men who hardly had time to smile in return; we spoke words of cheer and encouragement to those who had looked death in the face and whose souls were on the verge of eternity; we talked of loved ones and home when such heavens and havens seemed the most remote things in the universe; we offered our friendly services to heart-sick boys who never expected to see another friend on earth. And, gratified though they all were, they took it for granted because we wore the Y. M. C. A. badge, and the Y. M. C. A. me a always in the van of the advancing army where the soldiers need friendship and comradeship.

are

But let me tell one story of this terrible experience with the machine-gun company on the edge of the woods. If the Y. M. C. A. had no other testimony to offer in evidence of the confidence our soldiers have in its integrity and efficiency, it would be enough, more than enough. In the twilight an enlisted man walked up to me with perfect confidence, pointed to the red triangle on my arm and said, in broken English:

P "Maybe I get killed, like the others; you send my money to my mother?"

I asked him where his mother lived, and he replied, "Metilin, in Greece."

It seemed a long cry, but I promised, hoping that some way I might be able to get the money through.

He disappeared, and in less than ten minutes returned with eight hundred and fifty francs in French currency and one hundred and eighty dollars in American bills.

After receiving the treasure I began to write a receipt, when the man said: "No bother about receipt. You Y. M. C. A." When I returned to Château Thierry, still under bombs and still a wild welter of surging French and American troops, the Y. M. C. A. financial secretary took the money as calmly as if he had been a Wall Street or Broad Street banker, saying: "All right; I'll send a receipt to the company commander and transmit the amount to Greece, through Paris, by the next mail."

Of course there were casualties in Château Thierry and to the north. The Allies could not wipe out that impertinent and audacious salient between Soissons and Rheims without paying toll. Château Thierry had several field hospitals, at least one for each division engaged. Francis Sayre and I worked in one of them, and particularly with the men who were being carried in from the ambulances. They came in a sickening stream; doctors, orderlies, and stretcher-bearers were tired out and were working on their nerve; the patients ranged all the way from shattered and perishing hulks of humanity to slightly gassed cases and mere flesh wounds. Every one was too busy to answer questions, so we read the dressing station tags tied to the patients and avoided giving cigarettes to the gas cases. How wonderful these men were! As we lit a cigarette in our own lips and put it between the lips of the wounded man he looked his gratitude far more eloquently than words could have fashioned. Only once, and that in the surgical ward, did we hear a cry from those broken men, and then it was a dying boy who sighed with his last breath, "Mother, oh, mother!"

Far spent and on the verge of nerve collapse, Sayre and I turned away and walked silently back to the Y. M. C. A. The canteen was in a stately mansion, or what once had been a stately mansion before the dastardly Hun had blasted its beauty. In the courtyard and far out into the street there stretched an apparently endless line of men awaiting their turn to get to the counter. After the foodless days and bedless nights and bloody battles all they asked was a package of cigarettes, a square of chewing tobacco, a bar of chocolate, or a quarter of a pound of

crackers; they were willing to stand in line for one or two hours for the privilege of making that simple purchase; they were as quiet and orderly as if they had been entering church. Then darkness fell. In one sense it was a mercy, for the Y. M. C. A. canteen men were ready to drop from utter weariness; in another sense it was a tragedy, because several hundred war-weary and nerve-spent men could not buy what they wanted. most. Then it was that the spirit and the mission of the Y. M. C. A. were revealed; in order to give no guidance to the Boche airplanes lights were not allowed in Château Thierry and the secretaries could not see to sell or to make change. So they solved the problem by walking down the long waiting line with baskets, and giving, absolutely free, to each man what he wanted most-cigarettes, tobacco, sweet biscuits, or chocolate. Then the line melted away. It was a very fine thing and typifies the spirit of the Y. M. C. A. When the men have money and time to purchase commodities, the Y sells what they need at reasonable rates; when the moment of extremity comes, particularly at the front, and our fighting men have no chance to buy, then the Y gives everything away, without question of creed or race; and that is perhaps the noblest of all its noble work.

I am finishing this article in the refined security of a Paris hotel looking out across the beautiful Tuileries gardensthanks to the brilliant counter-offensive of the united Allied forces. For the first time in many days I have changed my clothes, washed my body, and slept upon a bed. As I look back I ask myself what impressed me most, what seemed the greatest thing I had seen in all the phases of the terrific battle; and I answer without hesitation, the unselfishness and valor of the Y. M. C. A. men. They were either too old to fight or were physically incapacitated, yet they had crossed the ocean to face the hazards of war out of sheer love for the imperiled cause or for the cheer and comfort of the fighting men of our Army; they asked for no financial returns and looked for no badges of glory; but wherever the danger was the greatest or the opportunity for service the most obvious I found thembankers, stock-brokers, preachers, university professors, manufacturers, professional men-working cheerfully, radiantly, persistently, and seeking neither praise nor reward. It was the Gloria in Excelsis of humanity. There may be defects in the administration of the Y. M. C. A.; it may rest upon a narrow theological foundation, and may make unreasonable exclusions at home; it may admit small men now and then to its personnel; but at the battle-front, where our soldiers are fighting and dying for all that our hearts hold dear, the Y. M. C. A. is a blazing, glorious, unmistakable evidence of the presence of God.

with more preparation and wider experience, I felt that I could return to my home county and get our rural schools out of a rut. Thus I am again county superintendent of schools.

If there should ever be any reason why I should not do educational work, I know that I could make my living as a gardener or florist, or, with capital, could become a successful farmer.

These are a few of the things I can do when necessary or do all the time:

Thread a needle, sew on buttons, pick up a pin or a dime from the floor, take my purse from my pocket and make change, go to market and bring as many bundles as the next one, work the combination on the lock box at the post office, play the piano, use the typewriter (slowly), dress myself completely, lacing and buttoning my shoes, buttoning all buttons except my collar button, undress with no help at all, eat with no help, using all eating utensils, black my shoes, shave myself with safety or ordinary razor, sweep the floor, build a fire, press clothes, and, in short, I have done and do the usual things of life, even to marrying a wife.

I have never before been persuaded to write or tell even a few of the things I have here written, and do it now only in the hope that the information or suggestions may help restore men to usefulness during and after the war.

I am in hopes, too, that I may be able to be of further service to our handicapped men, since I cannot go into the trenches. (But this reminds me to say that I hunt with rifle or shotgun. Last season I killed two wild turkeys with a .22 rifle.)

H

In addition to my general interest in re-education and reha bilitation, let me say that I have two brothers in the war, one in France in ambulance work and the other on a destroyer, either one of whom may need just such help in case he is wounded.

I would like to say, in conclusion, that the psychological element has been the deciding favorable condition in my life. Whether this mental attitude,, which I have always had, is due more largely to things inborn or to the mental environment which my parents kept me in is hard to say.

I have never had any doubt but that I could be useful to the world and achieve a fair degree of what is called success. This is due, no doubt, in some measure to the fact that, in all my parents' planning for me and my future, they planned for my success, and never in my presence, or otherwise, I think, expressed any doubt that I would be useful as other

men are.

Believing in the importance of the belief of others in me, and the consequent self-confidence so derived, I hold that the very first step in the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers is psychological-to drive out the "I-am-ruined, I-am-helpless, What-in-the world-will-I-do" idea. This must be supplanted with "Others have done, Others are doing, I SHALL DO."

Some may not need to get a new psychological attitude, and for such, opportunity, together with mechanical helps, perhaps, will be all they will need. For such, no doubt, it will be sufficient that each one should know just what hundreds and thousands similarly disabled are doing. Then they will attempt, and with perseverance will succeed.

E had been blinded at the taking of Gorizia, and the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III, stood by his bedside holding his hand.

"Neither I nor the country will ever forget the sacrifice which you have made."

"Ah, Sire," replied the soldier, turning his sightless face to the King with a smile, "my blindness does not make me so unhappy as you might think, for my eyes are still filled with a great light which will never fade, because of the last thing which they saw-the Austrians running away."

How much do most Americans know about Italians, anyhow? We see them coming and going from their work, with their picks and shovels over their shoulders. Few of us can speak even a few words of their language, so we are utterly unable to know what they are thinking or how they feel; and we call them "Wops" and "Dagoes" and "Guineas," and let it go at that. We complain that they have a Camorra, a Mafia, a Black Hand. The Camorra is simply the Tammany Hall of Naples, though it plays for smaller stakes. The Black Hand is nothing but a band of Italian criminals, like our gunmen. The name is not even Italian; it was invented by a New York journalist. The Mafia is a great secret society which extends over the whole of Sicily. Marion Crawford, who studied Sicily profoundly, believed it to be the descendant of one of the secret societies formed by the Greeks after the Roman conquest to keep alive the feeling of Greek nationality and loyalty.

How many of us know of the debt which we owe to Italyno less a thing than the victory of the Marne? Italy had been the ally of Germany and Austria, and in 1914 France had to fear an attack on her southern border. It was not till Italy had assured France that she would at least remain neutral that Joffre dared to withdraw from the Italian frontier troops enough to enable him to win the battle of the Marne. If it had not been for this assurance, the German campaign would have proceeded as per schedule, and what might have happened is too horrible to contemplate.

Do we know that the refugees from the provinces occupied by the Austrians and the people who stayed behind in them have suffered as much as the Belgians and the inhabitants of northern France? It is a delusion to think that the Austrians are less cruel than the Germans; the history of Italy for the

last hundred years proves that if the German is a brute the Austrian is a brute too, and a meaner one than the German.

The poor refugees and the inhabitants of the occupied districts have had no one to make the eloquent appeals for them which were made for Belgium and France. Italy herself has gone on caring for them, and, though she is not a rich country, she has shouldered the burden in silence, heavy as it is.

How many of us know that the Italian is the most responsive human being in the world? If you don't believe this, the next time you meet an Italian laborer on the road smile at him and say, "Buon giorno." You need not be afraid of being misunderstood; it is the friendly custom of his country, as it used to be in the rural districts here. And I will wager a subscription to The Outlook that if you do it as if you meant it you will get back an answering smile which will surprise you by the way it changes that laborer's face. But it must be done as if you meant it. Five and twenty years ago Queen Victoria used to spend the winters in Florence. She used to drive out in a little victoriadid it get its name because she loved it ?-preceded by a single outrider. As she passed, every one would turn and raise his hat. But the old lady was not always gracious in bowing back, and one day two peasants, outraged by a particularly curt nod, or perhaps none at all, ran out into the middle of the road and shook their fists after the carriage, and one called out, "You ought to go to our queen and learn how to be polite to poor people." Queen Margherita's bow, even to strangers, was a marvel. She would lean forward and smile, and her face would light up as if to say, "Why, where have you been all this time? It's so nice to see you back."

You have heard a lot about the Caporetto disaster. Do you know that that was the result of sheer ignorance? With devilish ingenuity the Austrians selected a section of the line which was manned by elderly men-second-line troops-and showered it with fake copies of Italian papers which said that peace would soon be declared; and the poor Italians believed it. So, when the Austrians appeared, crying out, " Peace has come," they let them into their trenches, and then the Austrians bayoneted them. There was nobody to undeceive the poor men. An Italian general told the Sindaco (mayor) of Rome that if the American Y. M. C. A. had been on that front the disaster would never have happened. Our men would have "put them wise;" and