The Project Gutenberg eBook, With Our Soldiers in France, by Sherwood Eddy

Title: With Our Soldiers in France

Author: Sherwood Eddy

Release Date: May 6, 2006 [eBook #18325]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH OUR SOLDIERS IN FRANCE***

[Frontispiece: The American Y.M.C.A. Headquarters in Paris.]

WITH OUR SOLDIERS IN FRANCE

Sherwood Eddy

Author of "Suffering and the War," "The Students of Asia," etc.

ASSOCIATION PRESS
NEW YORK: 124 EAST 28TH STREET
1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF
YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

To M. H. E.
AND THE REAL HEROES OF THE WAR
THE MOTHERS WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR SONS
AND THE WIVES WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR HUSBANDS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The American Y.M.C.A. Headquarters in Paris . . . . . . Frontispiece

The "Eagle Hut" in London

Harry Lauder Singing at a Y.M.C.A. Meeting.
The officer seated at the extreme right is Captain "Peg"

Wholesome and Entertaining,
Home Refreshments in London

Three Thousand Soldiers in the Crowded Hut

FOREWORD

The world is at war. Already more than a score of nations, representing a population of over a thousand millions, or two-thirds of the entire human race, are engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the bloody battlefields of Europe, Asia, and Africa. No man can stand in the mouth of that volcano on a battle front, or meet the trains pouring in with their weary freight of wounded after a battle, or stand by the operating tables and the long rows of cots in the hospitals, or share in sympathy the hardship and suffering of the men who are fighting for us, and remain unmoved. The man must be dead of soul to whom the war does not present a mighty moral challenge. It arraigns our past manner of life and our very civilization. It gives us a new angle of observation, a new point of view, a new test of values. It furnishes a possible moral judgment by which we can weigh our life in the balance and see where we have been found wanting.

These brief sketches are only fragmentary and have of necessity been hastily written. The writer has been asked to state his impression of the work among the men in France. He did not go there to write but to work. He has tried simply to state what he saw and to leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. A mere statement of the grim facts at the front, if they are not sugar-coated or glossed over, may not be pleasant reading, but it is unfair to those at home that they should not know the hard truth of the reality of things as they are.

Before the war broke out, it was the writer's privilege to make an extended tour for work among students in Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, and to visit Germany. Since the declaration of war, he has visited France, Italy, and Egypt, and has observed the effect of the war throughout Asia, in tours extending over nearly the whole of China and India. Last year he was in the British camps among the soldiers of England, Scotland, and Wales. Since America declared war he has been working with the various divisions of the British and American armies in France, from the great base camps, where hundreds of thousands of men are in training, up to the front with the men in the trenches.

For the sake of those who will follow with deep interest the boys who are already in France, or who will shortly be there, brief accounts are given of the various phases of a soldier's life in the base camps, the training school of the "Bull Ring," at the front, and in the hospitals.

CHAPTER I

AT THE FRONT

In the