GREAT LITTLE RIVERS

BY FRAZIER HUNT

The armies of the world were contending on the battlefields of France in a death struggle, known in history as the World War. It was a mighty clash of ideas and ideals. Frazier Hunt, a war correspondent and journalist, selected the Little Rivers of France as a subject to carry his theme: that little things sometimes set apart great differences; and that littleness and greatness are not matters of physical size.

FOR miles along the hard white road that had helped

save France a tiny river ran. But it was such a quiet race with life and time. It had no steep banks; only gentle, green, silent slopes that fell gracefully back from its edges. 5 Here and there fragrant woods wandered almost to its drowsy waters.

A cuckoo sounded its call, and far off its mate sent back the echo. On sun-splashed mornings the thrush came, and in the moonlight the nightingale sang to 10 this little stream.

It was a tiny river, and if in great America, only the countryside that knew its winding ways could have told its name. It was a brook for poets to dream by. Little islands of willows, weeping for France, slept in its heart. 15 One could almost whisper across it, and as a French schoolgirl of fourteen wrote, "Birds could fly over it with one sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were millions of men, the one turned towards the other, eye to eye. But the distance which separated them was greater

than the stars in the sky; it was the distance which separates right from injustice."

It was a tiny river; it was the Yser.

Oxen drawing the cultivating plows that will help feed France and win the war almost splash into its shallow edges 5 as they turn the furrow. And on hot July days, the old man who prods them with his pointed stick and the sturdy woman who handles the plow let them drink their fill of its cooling waters not plunging their noses deep like thirsty horses but gently drawing in the water with the lips, after the manner of oxen.

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It is a quiet stream that a child could ford without danger. It flows slowly and sweetly from the mother hills to the embracing sea. A few arched bridges leap from one low bank to another. It has not cut deep into the land of 15 France but it has cut deep into the heart of France. It is one of the ribbons of victory and glory that France will always wear across her breast. And it is a ribbon made red by the blood of the men of France who have died for France.

And yet we of America would call it a little stream, and old men would fish all day in it from a shaded velvet point, and boys swimming would hunt some favorite Devil's Hole where they might dive.

It is the Marne.

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For four years now it has flowed peacefully on while 25 men have fought to scar its banks with trenches ing themselves into the earth as only the muskrat had done in the forgotten days of peace. Strong, unafraid men came from the ends of the world to die by its side. And it would have gladly sung them a sweet, low lullaby, crooning a song .30

with which mothers on the shores of all the seven seas had once rocked them to sleep - only now the sound of heavy firing, dull booms of the cannon, and the spit and nervous drum of the machine gun, made its song as futile and ins distinguishable as the whisper of a child in the roar of a mob.

What a story its sweet waters had to tell to all the rivers of the world when they met in the broad sea a tale of strange men who fought and died that it might still be a part of France; a tale of deeds of glory and of valor and 10 of sacrifice. And some of these men had come from faraway America to this little river, this stream so tiny and so modest that it might have forever remained unknown and unsung.

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It was the Somme.

After all, what does size matter heart and of the soul?

except the size of the

The great Mississippi, the mystic Amazon, the majestic Hudson, the wide Danube - all mighty in power and commerce!

The Yser, the Aisne, the Oise, the Somme, the Marnelittle streams of France; old brooks as precious as Thermopyla or Bunker Hill!

Tiny are they and so was Bethlehem!

1. What three rivers are discussed? For what does each stand? 2. Explain the French schoolgirl's letter. Which party, to her, represented justice?

3. What great general is called the "Hero of the Marne"? Why? 4. Why are Thermopyla and Bunker Hill "precious"? Name some other "precious" places in the world.

5. What lesson do you get from this selection?

(Used by permission of the Red Cross Magazine.)