many words: "We're
ready for you!"

And the silhouette of that great ship, lined with khaki-clad American
boys, waiting, watching, as seen from another transport, where the
watcher who writes this story stands, is a sight never to be equalled
in art or story. To see the huge bulk of a great transport just a
stone's throw away, moving forward, without a sound from its
rail-lined, soldier-packed deck, is one of the striking Silhouettes of
Silence.

Thomas Carlyle once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre
of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the
American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of
eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American
army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the
Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history
beside its Allies, the English and the French.

The news came. The first division of American troops was to leave
overnight and march overland into the Marne line. Our Allies needed
us. They had called. We were answering.

As a tribute to the efficiency of the American army, may I say that the
one well-trained, seasoned division of troops that we had in a certain
quiet sector picked up bag and baggage overnight and, like the Arabs,
"silently stole away," and did it so well and so efficiently that not
even the Y. M. C. A. secretaries, who had been living with this
division intimately for months, knew that they were gone, and that a
new division had taken its place, until the next morning. Talk about
German efficiency--that phrase, "German efficiency," has become a
bugaboo to frighten the world. American efficiency is just as great,
if not greater.

I saw that division marching overland. It was a thrilling sight.
Coming on it suddenly, and looking down upon its marching columns from
the brow of a hill, and then riding past it in a Ford camionet all day
long with Irving Cobb, riding past its ammunition-wagons, past its
machine-gun battalion, past its great artillery company, past its
hundreds of infantrymen, past its trucks, past its clean-cut officers
astride their horses, past its supply-trains, past its flags and
banners, past its kitchen-wagons, seeing it stop to eat, seeing it
shoulder its rifles, seeing its ambulances and its Red Cross groups,
seeing its khaki-clad American boys wind through the valleys and up the
hills and over the bridges (the white st