"You'll get no hasty signatures to a petition in this city--we remember the sundial!"
_Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er, Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking; Dream of battled fields no more, Days of danger, nights of waking. . . ._
_Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er, Dream of fighting fields no more; Sleep the sleep that knows no breaking, Morn of toil, nor night of waking._
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. Here and there fragrant woods wandered almost to its 5 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 this little stream. 10
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. One could almost whisper across it, and as a French schoolgirl 15 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."
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, 10 after the manner of oxen.