A hundred thousand or more men and women made this pilgrimage. A hundred thousand and many more packed the streets of Washington the next day when the bier was carried from the Capitol to the grave at Arlington.
The attending ceremony was one of the most perfect things of the kind ever planned. It had the supreme merit of restraint. Every form of the country’s service had a place—not too many—a few—but they were always of the choicest—from the President of the United States down to the last marine, the best we had were chosen to follow the unknown boy.
There was an immense sincerity to it all. They felt it—the vast, inexpressible sorrow of the war. And no one felt it more than the President of the United States. What he said at Arlington, what he was to say the next day at the opening of the Conference, showed that with all his heart and all his mind the man hated the thing that had brought this sorrow to the country, and that he meant to do his part to put an end to it.
The ceremony was for the dead sacrifice, but the feature of it which went deepest to the heart and brought from the massed crowds their one instinctive burst of sympathy and greeting was the passing, almost at the end of the procession, of the War’s living sacrifice—Woodrow Wilson.
The people had stood in silence, reverently baring their heads as the bier of the soldier passed, followed by all the official greatness of the moment—the President of the United States, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, Pershing, Foch. And then, quite unexpectedly, a carriage came into view—two figures in it—a white-faced man, a brave woman. Unconscious of what they were doing, the crowd broke into a muffled murmur—“Wilson!” The cry flowed down the long avenue—a surprised, spontaneous recognition. It was as if they said: “You—you of all living men belong here. It was you who called the boy we are honoring—you who put into his eye that wonderful light—the light that a great French surgeon declared made him different as a soldier from the boys of any other nation.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “whether it is God, the Monroe Doctrine or President Wilson, but the American soldier has a light in his eye that is not like anything that I have ever seen in men.” Woodrow Wilson, under God, had put it there. His place was with the soldier. The crowd knew it, and told him so by their unconscious outburst.
