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Wounded Heroes of France: Humanity

Humanity has never shown such moral grandeur.

Those among these brave men who have faith, are conscious of such supernatural life and their letters--admirable collections have been published--reflect a light of authentic saintliness. The others, too, without knowing it, walk in the footsteps of Christ; at the moment of supreme sacrifice He will enlighten them with the brightness of His grace and will admit them, like their believing brothers, into the heaven promised to those who suffer for righteousness. Humanity which has never known horrors like those it is enduring now, has also never shown such moral grandeur, and it is not astonishing that in face of such great crimes and such great virtues, our soul should pause, breathless, incapable of expressing the excess of its emotion. The devoted wor of the American public for the wounded. I cannot speak to the great American public about our wounded, without saying how much we appreciate the fact that it has followed them, with admirable solicitude, all the length of their hard Calvary. Its stretcher-bearers have helped us rescue them at the front, its ambulances have carried them to our hospitals, where they have found its doctors, its nurses to tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to assure their material well-being and their moral comfort. And in after-care it has not been less solicitous: teaching the blind, reeducating the maimed and giving them the costly apparatus which take the place of their lost limbs. When they could not survive, despite efforts of science and devotion, it contributed toward assuring the future of their widows and orphans.

America to-day gives us even her blood; she has from the first given us her gold, given her heart!

The great series of battles, known in general as the Battle of Picardy, formed a prelude to the final acts of the war. A stirring account of these battles is given in the narrative which follows.