The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1922-10-23
Dorothy Dix Tails
The Time AdiusterA1.

A few weeks ago I stood on battle
field il the midst of the devastated
region IN France. Here for four years
the struggle went on without ceasing.
over hundred times, and taken and
retaken. Every clod was soaked in
blood.
After the war the earth was gashed
by trenches, and pitted with shell
holes until it looked like a rabbit war
rem. Rusty arrangements of barbed
wire hung like brown cobweb over
the ground. OF the pretty little cot
tages. and picturesque villages that
once dotted the plain, not one re-
manned. There was no sign to show
that there had been a happy pros
playing in doorWayS and men and
women singing at their work.
Utter ruin people said, surveying
this scene, only a year or two ago,
utter deso1ationi Hopeless!"
But Time, the healer, Time the ad-
juster has been at work. What was
No Mans Land is now Gods Garden.
The winds and the rains have beaten
down the harsh ridges of the trenches
and filled up the shell holes, and from
the soil where lie in unknown graves
so many of the sons of France, there
has bloomed such a luxuriance of
flowers as I have never seen before.
Waist high they grow, and millions
upon millions of blooms there are
white of daisies, scarlet of peoples,
blue of ragged robbins. 1t is as if the
colors of France sprang from the very
bodies of the men who died that she
might live.
Already the peasants are creeping
back to the land that has belonged
to their families for centuries and that
is part of their very being. Already
piles of heaped up barbed wire along
A. %1II L,
ing their fields from the purposes of
war back to the PURPOSES of peace.
Already the dugor q in which men
hid their faces from the angel of
death, and the telephone stations from
which went forth the messages that
were the DEGREES of fate are crum-
bling away, their timbers fallen, their
outlines blurred. A few more winter
winds, a few more summer rains, and
there will be nothing physical left to
show where the worlds titanic combat
between Might and Right took place.
Time will have done is work. as it
has done it for thousands upon thou
sands of other battlefields, where men
fought, and b1ed, and died. and where
fusty archaeologists now potter, and
dig, and delve, among broken frag-
ments Of forgotten things that were
once the symbols of hope and glory,
or defeat and despair.
And as I looked at the place of
which, thru four bitter. anxious years
I had read with a heart that stood
still with fear, or leaped with joy as
the tide of victory swung this way or
that, and that 1 saw now SO gaily
Haunting its banner of blue, and
white, and red in the summer wind, I
maryelled at the magic wrought by
Time.
And I wondered that we mortals
had not the faith to trust to time the
solution of those difficulties with
which we vainly vex our puny human
intelligence, and that we find it SO
hard to realize that, at last. Time
binds up our broken spirits and
bodies. even as 1t does those of a great
battlefield.
Do we grieve? Time is the great
counselor. It is Time that takes you
to it's breast and rocks you in it's arms
and comforts you as a mother COM
forts a child who weeps. Tears can
not always flow. No wound can al
ways bleed. Time lays its gentle hand
upon us. and somehow the smiles
chase away the tears, and the wound
heals.