Page:Armistice Day.djvu/128

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106
ARMISTICE DAY

To-day has brought many things to the world that one may not guess. But not yet are our men delirious with joy, or given over to jubilation. There was cheering and here and there some rocket flares were fired, while many a boy in khaki slapped another on the back and said: "Well, I guess the old guerre is fini."

It has not yet come over them with all its force that the young lives they had taken in their hands every day are safe with all that safety to young lives means, and that there is an end of the horror unspeakable and of the weariness and hardship—that once again after four years all's right with the world.

Once that idea does come their faces will turn in but one direction—toward home and those who love them and have shared them for the world's greatest cause, and whose faces they thought never to see again. For them peace will mean but one thing—home.

What a series of unforgettable pictures these boys of ours saw on this day of days when the world laid down its arms; pictures of No Man's Land, where men walked upright in the daylight, where men in khaki met men in gray, to swap souvenirs and laugh the strange, short laugh that men laugh whose lives have been given back to them; of a battery of guns that had poured forth death, now silent; of French towns bright with