“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 he............