The Holbrook news., 1921-05-27

Describing a visit paid last year to the battlefields of France, Faith Hunter Dodge wrote as follows in the New York Tribune:
 Here's flowers for you" wrote Shakespeare.
 Here's flowers for you," repeat Americans and French, lavish in their giving for Our Boys Memorial day. Here's flowers for yOu,' echo the sun-kissed hills and valleys of France, never more prodigal of blossoms. And every American soldiers grave in France is heaped high with wreaths and flowers on Memorial day. Daffo- dfls in wild profusion, blue iris, red poppies and peonies, sweet-smelling white syringas and pale primrose find their places among the numberlesS wreaths of immortelIes.
 Flowers Everywhere
 From slimiest shell holes and poi sonous trenches myriad violets are springing; they seem to have sought, each sacred spot where a soldier fell. Down in deserted dugouts we pick up bits of shrapnel and under meath find violets and anemones ]! They thrust their petals through the wreckage of crushed and crumbling stones and plaster of ruined houses :, they hug the twisted rails of aban- doned Zeppelin-torn railroad tracks; they wind their slight stems about barbed wire and peek through the fallen, tattered, torn remnants of camouf1age. The sobS which rise un- bidden in the throat of every visitor to this holy ground are stified at the sight of them; for they bring an in- disputable air of beauty, purity, peace hope and happiness to this desolate, devastated. striken land.
 Recently I went back to the battle fields of Verdun, St. Mihiel. the Ar gonne, Belleau Woods and Soissons. there I found ruin, desolation, destruc- ton lndescribable-and ashes.
 But the pussy willows were in bud beside the road, and peree-neige thrust their snowy petals through broken stone and rusted iron. Ont in the American cemetery at Ploisy every grave had it's own fresh, dew-moist- ened roses: on the graves at Juvigny were hyacfnths and lilies; in Belleau woods buttereups paved the ground with gold and in the Argonne violets and anemones blOssomed unafraid.
 Where 500 Americans Lie.
 In the little white-cross cemetery at Verdun, where lie five hundred khaki-clad heroes under the Stars and Stripes, anemones, narcissus, hyacinths
 
 shedding their perfume like censers in a temple
 Children trudged daily out to Ro- mame. their black aprons filled with flowers and plants which their loving hands transplanted to the American graves guarded by their. 23, 3,OOO shining white crosses and their 23.000 flags. And far away beyond the plains of the Woevre the violet blue of the clear. soft atmosphere meets the infinite blue of the skies.
 The very soil of France, revivified and triumphant. is joining in the peo- ple's paeans of praise to the heroic soldiers who fell for just cause.
 "How kind the world isl" exclaimed Helen Wolcott when she found her aviator brothers grave, at Lafincourt. %iHow kind the world is '" she cried in letter. to her father, Dr. Wolcott, head of the Smithsonian institution, at Washington. And because that let ter is typical, because 1t tells the story of the American graves in France, here it is for others who have known the anguish of bereavement:
 An American Boys Grave.
 "Oh, Daddy dear, I found our boy today, just above a poor little ruined town, a town of quaint narrow streets. holIow-eyed houses, crumbled walls and burnt-out desolation everywhere. Just above and near the top of low broad hill was little cemetery in a rectangle of tall pine trees, with a vine-covered wooden fence around it.
 Tt is a country of low rolling hills, and, as far as the eyes can reach, nothing but unfenced fields.
 Stuart is almost in the middle of the rectangle, with perhaps two hun TRIBUTE AND PRAYER.