LILLE, LAON, AND ST. DIÉ

LILLE, LAON, AND ST. DIÉ

JOHN H. FINLEY

Lille, Laon, and St. Dié!

I.

What memories, from far away,
When happy France was wont to be
Weaving her peaceful tapestry
And singing by her clacking loom
Amid her gardens all a-bloom
What memories, from far away,
Of France's joyous yesterday

Rise through the dimming mists of years,
The smoke of battle and the tears

Of those who daily look across

The furrowed, crimsoned fields of loss
Ploughed all the trenched and barbéd way
From Lille to Laon and St. Dié.

Lille!

II

Long, long ago I was in Lille;
E'en then a veil did half conceal
Her face, but not the fleecy rack
Of clouds upon the shrieking track
Of shell and shrapnel bearing death;
It was the sweet sea-vapor's breath
Encircling her as if in fear

I'd see the living Tête de Cire

And ne'er contented be elsewhere

In this then peaceful world. 'Twas there

They made for me a regal feast;

But now we here who have the least

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Have more than they who had the most
And played so gallantly the host;
And so, as my own prayer is said:
"Give us this day our daily bread,"
For those who hunger, too, I pray
In Lille and Laon and St. Dié.

Laon!

III

I climbed to Laon above the plain
Where now the Teuton battle-stain
Colors the crag, to find the spot
Where he was born who left his lot
Of luxury to bear Christ's name
To savages that fought with dart
And tomahawk, but knew no art
To match the red atrocity

That now holds Laon, in blasphemy
Of that same Father of us all.

Would Père Marquette would come and call
These heathen to repentance ere

The Strafe and Krieg and answ'ring guerre
Shall make the whole wide world a hell!-
But if he cannot, we who dwell

In this free land whose mightiest flood
He found, will give our mingled blood
To wash that brutish stain away

From Lille and Laon and St. Dié.

And St. Dié!

IV

Dear is this village of the Vosges
List'ning afar the Marne's éloge

LILLE, LAON, AND ST. DIÉ

And to herself repeating o'er

The word she whisp'ring spoke before
All others in the world—a word
That all the planet since has heard-
"America!" Here was the spring
Of our loved country's christening;
Here in this cloistered scholar's haunt
Was our New World baptismal font,
Now scarred and blackened by the guns
Of Europe's scientific Huns.

America, from that same bowl

Thou 'lt be baptized anew in soul;
But not by water, by the fire
Of thine own sacrosanct desire
For right, flashing in carmine spray
From Lille to Laon and St. Dié.

V

Lille, Laon, and St. Dié!

Our battle front, as theirs to-day
Who fight for France, all unafraid
Of death, weary but undismayed,
To help push back the green-gray line
That it may never leave the Rhine
Again to menace all the good

Of long-dreamed human brotherhood.
Here shall our France-befriended land
Take now its sacrificial stand;

Fight for a free humanity,

Fight for the thing that ought to be,
And our great debt to France repay
At Lille and Laon and St. Dié.

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VIVIANI AT SPRINGFIELD'

Gentlemen and Ladies:

Before coming here we went to the field of silence to lay quick-fading flowers on the immortal tomb of Abraham Lincoln and bear to his shade the greeting of all France.

And I would have you know that however great the distance between Springfield and France may be, the radiance of his noble face has long been known in our native land. In no democracy did any man offer the world a purer image than he by his noble career. That career is far better known by you than by me. You know that, born of the people, the son of a man who could not read, after having in his youth suffered every sort of privation, he rose through silent meditation, by study, to the full cultivation of his mind and the full development of his will. You know that silently he rose to the summit of civic honor; and that from the summit he had attained he looked with untroubled gaze upon a great, an heroic, a tragic duty; he knew that the minds of men cannot without abasement live in contact with injustice. And that is why whatever pity and compassion rent his soul, since the equality of all human beings must needs be proclaimed, since the laws must needs rise to the level of man's dignity in all places, he let loose civil war upon his native land—that civil war whose heroes we have seen in their old age reconciled, wherever we have passed. On the morrow of his gigantic enterprise he died. He cannot be said to have been buried in his triumph; that triumph will last as long as an American is left to revere it, and

1 Delivered May 7, 1917.