flash-light spell out the lettering on the cross.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that this was France speaking to America:

"Traveller, hast thou ever seen so great a grief as mine?"

And when I paused in the darkness of that night and thought of the one
million and a quarter of the best manhood of France who had given their
lives for the precious things that we hold most dear: our homes, our
children, our liberty, our democracy; and when I thought that France
had saved that for us; and when I remembered the funeral processions
that I had seen every day since I had been in France, and when I
remembered the women doing the work of men, handling the baggage of
France, ploughing the fields of France; doing the work of men because
the men were all either killed or at the front; when I remembered the
little fatherless children that I had seen all over France, whose sad
eyes looked up into mine everywhere I went; and when I remembered the
young widows (every woman of France seems to be in black); and when I
remembered the thousands of blind men and boys that I had seen being
led helplessly about the streets of the cities and villages of France;
and when I remembered that lonely wife that one Sunday afternoon in
Toul I had watched go and kneel beside a little mound and place flowers
there--the dates on the stone of which I later saw were "March, 1916,"
then I cried aloud in the darkness as I realized the tremendous
sacrifice that France has made for the world, as well as England and
Belgium. "No, France! No, England! No, little Belgium! this
traveller has never seen so great a grief as thine!"

"No, mothers and fathers, little children, wives, brothers, sisters of
France, and England, and Belgium, this traveller, America, has never