SOON after this magazine comes out, flowers will be laid
on countless graves of soldiers in the Civil War, North
and South. Many of them were young as young and
as brave as those now daily going to death for a great
cause. There will be flowers for the newly fallen, too, and
there will be tears, and a thousand speakers on Decora-
tion Day will refer to the soldier grandsons of those whose
sacrifices that day commemorates.

The khaki they wear is the final emblem of the united country; and the title of this vivid sketch is a happy expression of the idea.

Blue + Gray

By Sophie

Kerr

Author of "The Blue Envelope," "The Golden Block," etc.
Illustrations by C. F. PETERS

"Could you please tell me where to get off to be near the Hippodrome, ma'am?"

I reply and he says shyly, in his inimitable soft drawl,

B

EFORE me lies a letter from a New England boy now training for aviation service in Texas, a boy who had never been farther south,than.Boston until he entered the Army. He says: "The people here are kinder and more open-hearted and hospitable than I could ever have dreamed. I never thought the South was like this."

A Georgia lad in khaki turns to me anxiously The survivors of these great armies will march
in the Subway:

under the old torn battle flags in honor of their
dead comrades, and with them will march
sons and grandsons under new, bright flags
-one flag. The old hates are gone-the old
grudges, even the old festering sore of recon-
struction days is well nigh healed.

"I sure am obliged. I was right scared at first to ask a stranger anything here in New York, but everybody's just so nice! I don't know why people down home say the Nawth's so cold and hard."

"You like it up here, then?" I ask. "Yes, ma'am," he says. "When I get back from France I'm going to settle up Nawth somewhere. I like it fine."

=

In the list of those rescued from the Tuscania were names from the North, names from the East, names from the South, names from the West, and I know, from every camp I hear of, from little items here and there in each paper and magazine that I pick up, that every State in the Union has given its

Khaki

quota of sons. And so, as one artist friend
of mine quaintly puts it: "Blue plus gray
equals khaki."

And that brings me to remembering other
things. On Decoration Day garlands and flags
innumerable will deck the graves of the men
who fought for the Union, and the no less
brave and devoted soldiers of the Confederacy.

Let no one think these old hates, these old grudges were not once real and terrible. A charming old lady, who was just a girl when the guns of 1861 first sounded, told me that an acquaintance, a Northern girl, said to her, in a passionate rage against the enemy, that she "hoped to wade knee deep in Southern blood.” Of course, she hoped nothing of the sort, but at the moment she undoubtedly thought she meant it. It is a sample of the talk of the time among the women.

Another and more amusing episode occurred when a young Southern miss was sent to stay with relatives in the North. Burning with indignation over the wrongs to her native

I never

"The people here are kinder and more open-hearted and
hospitable than I could ever have dreamed.
thought the South was like this"

heath, she was in no mood to enter into such social gaieties as were offered her, but was not permitted to withdraw from them entirely. At an evening party she was asked to sing. She refused. She was again asked-then urged. With a scornful toss of her curls and a flirt of her crinoline ruffles, she sat down at the piano and sang-of course "The Bonnie Blue Flag!" Having reached the lines

"I envy not the Northern girl

With robes and jewels rare,

Though diamonds deck her snowy neck,
And stolen pearls her hair,"

ing, many of them. In Maryland, where sympathy was mostly for the South, yet secession was not effected, elections were held under the auspices of the bayonet. Men walked to the polls between files of soldiers, and each would-be voter was sternly questioned. One austere old Methodist was not permitted to vote because, under this examination, he had said that he believed all war to be wrong and that he would side neither with North nor South.

"That is neutrality, and neutrality is disloyalty. You cannot vote," said the Federal authority in charge.

But who remembers or cares for these things to-day, save as a background of courage for the army of democracy en route to Berlin?

66

"My father was killed in the first battle of Manassas," said a Southern woman to me, not long ago and I knew

that her childhood and girlhood had been lived under the heavy shadow of privation and care that her father's death had brought.

"But I have no feeling against the North," she assured me a moment later. "And my two nephews are volunteers-the first in our town to go," she concluded proudly. "It seems queer they should fight for the flag their own blood fought against, but I tell you that they got their fighting spirit right from their grandfather-my father. So he gave something big to his country, even if he was called a traitor at the time."

she could not resist substituting with emphasis the words "crooked neck" for "snowy neck" and, I fear, banging the piano with a defiance that was as amusing as it was sincere.

And somehow I felt as though she had put her finger on the one great thing in all these memories of the blue and the gray. The color of the uniform the men wore is of little consequence to-day. Even the fact

But there were graver manifestations of feel- that brother fought against brother in that

"Everybody's just so nice! I don't know why people down home say the Nawth's so cold and hard... I like it fine"

A new American army millions strong, and eighty-two of its weapons