As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful, and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover, the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village, in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous and gentle and as kind.

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded with soldiers—kindly French soldiers who were clearly living happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry burst forth, "My good Heavens, man—what if this were in Wichita or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting about here were just little children three years ago when their daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia—or back East in Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful thing—what a hell in the earth, war is!"

And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and waste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sitting together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line. And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat—that precious load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne where we were the oldest people in the ship's company. And we began talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth. If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the storm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, how much—how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred? How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such a sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise—yet her heart was a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, his keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick in him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out of him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and they were so young and so untried!

The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our car were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we were inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the road menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside the thirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last spring that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep them thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they found that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left the German prisoners and came to French road menders—generally French Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns. These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a few yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal. A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got bumpy and at given distances along the road were repair stations for the government automobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war. At night along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the line we travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurried through the night, passed village after village swarming with soldiers, black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritate the French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding into picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on the sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks. Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due course we came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur of the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we found a field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is to be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the hospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw one hospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred cases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that we had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the line had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through the hospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure, some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, and hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Of course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless. The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the Americans. They probably feel that there are more essential things to consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospital we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the earth."

And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, and in a bull-pen near the railroad station waiting for the trains to take them to the interior of France were six thousand German prisoners—for the most part well-made men. Here and there was a scrub—a boy, a defective, or an old man; showing that the Germans are working these classes through the army; but indicating, so far as one batch of prisoners from one part of the battle line may indicate, that the Germans still have a splendid fighting army. But the old German army that came raging through Belgium and northern France in 1914 is gone. Germany is well past the peak in man power, as shown in the soldiers of the line. It is also likely that the morale of the German line has its best days behind it. The American ambulance men in the Verdun sector told us of a company of German soldiers who had come across a few nights before to surrender, after killing their officers. They appeared at about ten o'clock at night, and told the French to cease firing at exactly that time the next night for ten minutes and another troop of Germans would come across. The French ceased at the agreed hour and thirty more came over and brought the mail to their comrades! That, of course, is not a usual occurrence. But similar instances are found. The best one can say of the German morale in the army is that it is spotted. In civilian life the nearer one gets to Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale seems to be sound. These things we found in the air up near the front line trenches, where German prisoners talk, and where one sees the war "close up."

But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered, and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town, across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings! Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed towns for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding breeches—and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistband from 36 to 44 inches—little did it seem to Henry and me that we should first meet a German shell face to face in a place like Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely shaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gathered to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!—an awful sound! It was as if someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store—at Emporia—tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods, and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landed it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seats six thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realized that he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothing to the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let it pass also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier. So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American Ambulance Service. In a minute there was a fearful whistle—long, piercing, and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock in Emporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time we saw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away—over by the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentioned the matter. It seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a secret, but if the others had that notion of it, far be it from us to blab! An ambulance driver came lazying around the corner and began to start his car.

"Any one hurt, Singer?" asked a handsome youth named Hughes, of the Corps.

"Man hit by the first shell up here by the railroad. I'm going after him."

"Hurt badly?" asked another boy.

"Oh, arm or shoulder or something blown off. I'll be back for lunch."

The details interested us; we could see that the secret was being uncovered. Again came an awful roar and another terrific bang—this time the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before—perhaps 300 feet away. Every one ducked. In five seconds they had taught me to duck. It's curious how quickly the adult mind acquires useful information. But Henry for some reason got a bad start, and his duck needed correction. To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get as much as possible of your body under the eaves of your steel helmet. Somewhere between the second and third bang, they got a helmet on me. No one knows where it came from, nor how it got there. But there it was, while they were correcting Henry's duck. In spite of them, when he ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multiplying his exposure by ten. But it really does a fat man little good to duck anyway; the eaves of his helmet hardly cover his collar. It was while they were trying to telescope Henry that some one grabbed me by the arm and said: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!" Abri was a brand new word to me, but it seemed to be some place to go and that was enough for me.

"Where" (read this line with feeling and emphasis) "is the abri?" The ambulance boy took me by the arm and led me on a trot to a dugout covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand bags, and we went in there and found it full of French officers. They have some sense. The abri would not turn a direct explosion of a shell; but it would shield one against a glancing blow and against the shrapnel which sprays itself out from the point where the shell hits like a molten iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come over we left the abri. The Germans had been allowancing Recicourt to nine a day. But that day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. They came very close and fairly fast together. As they came Henry was sitting in the barn where the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunch was on the table and Henry was writing. The shells sounded just outside the barn. "What are you writing, Mr. Allen?" asked Major Murphy. "I'm sketching," stuttered the Wichita statesman, "a sort of a draft of the American terms of peace!"

After three extra bombs had come in the Germans turned their guns from the town, and we had our lunch at our ease. And such a lunch! A melon to begin with; a yellow melon that looks like the old-fashioned American muskmelon and tastes like a nectar of the gods, followed by onion soup. Then followed an entree, a large thin slice of cold sausage which they afterward told us was made of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then roast veal sliced thin and slightly underdone with browned potatoes; then new beans served as a separate course; then fruit and cheese and coffee and cigars! And that in a barn!



We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piled into an ambulance, were buttoned in from the back by the driver, and went sailing up the hill and into the woods. They told us that we were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess. We remembered that but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices, that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and bloody fighting. And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannon roaring all about us. We were told that four thousand cannon were planted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of them were active that day. Yet we could see none, so completely were they hidden by camouflage. The woods were barren of leaves or branches though they should have been in foliage. We gazed through the windows of the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and then rather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefully corded against the tree trunks were not sticks of cord wood at all, as they seemed, and as they should have been if the wood had been under the ax instead of under fire. They were French seventy-five shells—deadly brass cartridges two feet long, all nicely and peacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees! We rode through them for several miles. Beside the road always were the little heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always the engineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made by the incoming shells. And occasionally they were coming in; though they seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest. The ear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between what are known as arrives and departs. The departs were going out that day at the ratio of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wasted enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize! Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minute or so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping of our own broad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer. For some way the sound of the shells of our own guns shrieking over us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation of a great faith.

At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we came upon the first aid post, a quarter of a mile from the opposite edge of the wood and but half a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun The first aid post there was a cellar, half excavated, and half covered with earth, and roofed with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usual French doctors, stretcher bearers and American Ambulance men were there. And there was the little cemetery, always found at a first aid post where those are buried who die on the stretchers or in the dugout. It was lovingly adorned by the French with the tri-colour of France, with bronze wreaths, with woodland flowers, and was altogether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. They showed us a shell by the cave—a gas shell that had come over during the morning and had hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It was gently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed—but gingerly. Other shells were popping into the place and fairly near us with some regularity and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me that we had no desire to stare grim war's wrinkled front out of countenance, and we hoped that the Major and Mr. Norton were nearly ready to go back. But we heard this:

From the Major: "How far forward can we go toward Hill 304; we would like to see it, but have no desire to go further than you care to have us."

And from the French lieutenant in charge: "Go to Berlin if you want to!"

It occurred to Henry and me, considering our feelings, that the Major's nonchalant use of that "we" was without the consent of the governed. But when he started forward we followed. Our moral cowardice overwhelmed our physical cowardice, and our legs tracked ahead while our hearts tracked back. The Major swung along the road at a fast clip; Mr. Norton went with him. For short-geared men we followed as fast as we could, but it was at a respectful distance. Nearer and nearer we came to the open field, and by the same token, quicker and nearer and hotter came the German shells. We were continually on the duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm that made distance come slow. We came to a dead mule in the road. He had been bombed recently, and was not ready for visitors. Now a mule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but in the transition state between a mule and hamburger, a mule leaves much to be desired. As we passed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry began his kidding. He always begins to guy a situation under emotion. "Bill," he cried, "if we die we'll at least save our nice new hundred dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And from me he got this: "And say, Henry—if we die we won't have to face our wives and tell 'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit! There's that comfort in sudden death!"

It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen all there was to be seen of the war. Hill 304 would be there after the treaty of peace was signed and the Major and Norton then could come to see it. But they were bound for Berlin; so we slowly edged by that poor mule; he seemed to be the longest mule we had ever—well, he seemed to be a sort of trans-continental mule, but we finally got past him and came to the edge of the woods. It took about three ducks to twenty yards, and passing the mule we had four downs and no gain. That gave the Germans the ball. So when we got to the edge of the wood and were standing looking into the French trenches and at Hill 304 off at our right, after the Major had handed Norton the field glasses and Norton had considerately handed them to Henry, who passed them to me for such fleeting glance as politeness might require, the Germans came back with that ball. It came right out of Berlin, too. One could hear it howl as it crossed the Thiergarten and went over Wilhelm Strasse and scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. There never was another such shell. And we ducked—all of us. Henry said he never saw me make such a duck—it was the duck of a life-time. And then that shell landed. It was a wholesale hardware store that hit—no retail affair. The sound was awful. And then something inside of me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had been reading Dr. Crile's book on the anesthesia of fear, and suddenly it occurred to me that the shell had hit me and torn a hole in me and that fear had deadened the pain. Slowly and in terror my right hand groped back to the place of the wound, expecting every moment to encounter blood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched over, waiting for the fountain of junk to cease spraying. Nearer and nearer came the shrinking fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, but something more terrible! There, dangling by its apex, hung that pie-shaped slice of shirt from those cotton khaki trousers—ripped clear out! And Paris fifty miles away!

Slowly we unfolded ourselves from the duck. And as we came up—sping! went a sharp metallic click on Norton's helmet. A bit of shrapnel had hit it. Under a hat he would have been killed! So we went back to the first aid post—me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force of will, and both hands!

So long as Norton and the Major had led the way from the dugout, it simultaneously flashed over Henry and me that we should lead the way back, and not leave all the exertion to our companions. So we set the pace back.

At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomed us back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our own French guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. It seemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as we knew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage—which was like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry said: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, or else it's syncopated." Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location that Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal in the neighbourhood!" And to the assembled company in the dugout he remarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldog model that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemen will get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Which he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came out of the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back to Recicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed the gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the body of a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met death while we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk.

We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before we could get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned up the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used a dozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And that night as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital, Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him in our corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth of metal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill," he said gently, as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as I ever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you're wearing these days!"

For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience, and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it was not so bad. We were scared—badly scared; but we could laugh at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused: "I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last we slept.



CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pershing and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.

One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulance coming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking to some American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticed the arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans were after something in the neighbourhood—perhaps a big gun, perhaps an ammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the target when we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road. Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. It was getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that the ammunition trains would be passing that cross-road at that time. And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our hearts jumped—at least Henry's and mine jumped—as we saw that between us and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded and stalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the road from the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This," said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mighty dangerous place." As the word "place" escaped him he was on the ground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulance drivers—Singer and Hughes—neglecting to unlock the ambulance doors, ran up the road and began working with the drivers of the camion to get the great van on the road again. The other occupants of the ambulance also hurried to the camion—through the windows of the ambulance; no one was left to unbutton the thing for Henry and me. Henry insists that he was there alone; that he was afraid to follow me through the window for fear of sticking in it. He had not been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for a year and had no girlish lines in his figure. And the arrives were certainly bouncing in rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where we could duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulance was no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than an umbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully looking through the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure was less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance than it would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, held fast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next "arrive" to come with commendable fortitude. And then it came. It sounded like the old grand-daddy of all shells. We fancied we could sense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway we looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger. And then it struck—whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five feet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree. We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then our consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our eyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier. We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves, a certain calmness of soul—or was it merely a dramatic expression of a soldierly attitude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, who had been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the shell headed straight for us, it seemed that we should come back after the war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We had no desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about the tablet on that tree stump!

The French soldier strolled over to us; helped to straighten out the camion, and when we learned that he was going down the hill we gave him a lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poilu who, washed and shaved and classified, turned out to be an exchange professer from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and it was he who told us of the bombing of the hospital at Landrecourt; we'll call it Landrecourt to fool the censor, who thinks there is no hospital there. At the mention of the hospital the Major turned to us and said: "That's where we sent that pretty red-headed nurse who came over with you on the boat. And," added the Major, "that is the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New York!" whose name is also changed to fool the censor. It was a better known name!

"Say," exclaimed Henry, "the Aunt of the Gilded Youth!"

"You mean our ambulance boy who came over on the boat with you—the multimillionaire?" asked the head of the American Ambulance service.

"The same," answered Henry, who turned to me and said in his oratorical voice: "The plot thickens." Then the Frenchman told us the story of the raid: How the airmen had come at midnight, dropped their bombs, killing nurses and doctors, and how the discipline of the hospital did not even flutter. He said that the head nurse summoned all her nurses, marched them to the abri at the rear of the hospital, and stood at the door of the abri, while the girls filed in, and just as the last nurse was going into the dugout with the head nurse standing outside, the airmen dropped a bomb upon her and erased her! None of the nurses inside was hurt. Two doctors were killed and a number of patients. Landrecourt was on our way and we hurried to it.



Was there ever a martial adventure without a love story in it? Little did it seem to Henry and me as we left our humble homes in Wichita and Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, that we two thick-set, sedentary, new world replicas of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza should be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. We were not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wives were three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married man gets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of his wife. For when he gets into the barbed wire tangle of a love affair, he needs the wise counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we were, two fat old babes in the woods and here came the Gilded Youth, the Eager Soul and the Young Doctor—sping! like a German shell—right into our midst, as it were.

There at Landrecourt we found the Eager Soul, a badly scared young person—but tremendously plucky! And mad—say, that girl was doing a strafing job that would have made the kaiser blush! And the fine part of it was, that its expression was entirely in repression. There was no laugh in her face, no joy in her heart, and we scarcely knew the sombre, effective, business-like young person who greeted us. And then across the court we saw something else that interested us. For there, walking with his patrician aunt, we saw the Gilded Youth. Evidently he had heard of the raid, had run over from Valaincourt on some sort of military permission.

"Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs. Chesman—this is practically her hospital. I mean she and her group are keeping it equipped and going—a wonderful work. I mean here is a real thing for a woman to do. And, oh, the need of it!"



"Nice sort?" This from Henry, observing that there was no move toward us, on the part of the Gilded Youth and Auntie. Henry may have had his theory for their splendid isolation. But it received no stimulus when the Eager Soul answered:

"Oh, yes, I believe so. I haven't met her yet. They all say she is charming." Henry looked at me. She caught the glance. Then to cover his tracks he grinned and said: "Charm seems to run in their family."

"Yes," she returned amiably. "One meets so many nice people on the boat."

And Henry, still in pursuit of useful social information, insisted: "Well, are they as nice in the war zone as they are—on the boat?"

We got our first dimple then, and the Eager Soul tucked in a wisp of red hair, as she answered: "Well, really, I've been too busy to know." She turned absent-mindedly toward the figure of the Gilded Youth, across the court. But the dimples and the smile faded and she closed the door firmly and finally on romance, when she said: "On the record of service shown by my entrance card, they have made me assistant to the new head nurse who is coming over from Souilly to-night."

After we had told her that we were going to American headquarters soon, she smiled again, to show us that she knew that when we went probably we would see the Young Doctor. But she let the smile stand as her only response to Henry's suggestion of a message. In another moment she turned to her work.

"Well," said Henry, "some pride! 'One meets so many nice people on the boat!' The idea being that her outfit at home is just as good as Auntie's group in New York, even if he didn't introduce her! You know I rather like the social spunk of our Great Middle West!"

While we were talking the Gilded Youth began moving Auntie slowly but rather directly around the court to us. It occurred to me that perhaps he realized that we were the only social godfathers that the Eager Soul had in Europe, and that if he introduced us to Auntie it would be an indication that the affair of the boat, if it was an affair, was to be put upon a social basis! And in two minutes more he had docked Auntie at our pier. A large, brusk, well-groomed, good-looking woman of fifty was Auntie. Her Winthrop and Endicott blood advertised itself in her Bostonese, but she was sound and strong and the way she instantly got at the invoice price of Henry and his real worth, pleased me. She was genuine American. The thing that troubled me was the fear that Henry would begin too soon to lambast onion soup. But he didn't and in a few moments we were having this dialogue:

HENRY: "Oh, yes, indeed; we've grown fond of her. Her father was—"

AUNTIE: "Oh, yes, I knew her father. Mr. Chesman and he were interested together in New Mexican mining claims in the eighties; I believe they made some money. But—"

THE GILDED YOUTH: "Well, Auntie—would you mind telling me how—?"

AUNTIE: "Why, on her application blank, of course, with her father's name, age and residence."

THE GILDED ONE: "But you never mentioned it to me?"

AUNTIE: "Nor to her, either. Why should I? This is hardly the place to organize the Colonial Dames! I believe you said a few minutes ago that you had met her on the boat."

HENRY: "One meets so many nice people on the boat!"

ME: "You've heard of the woman who said she didn't know the man socially, she had just met him coming over on the boat!"

The Gilded Youth looked quickly at me, catching me suppressing a wink at Henry, who grinned at the expiring ghost of it. Then Auntie led the talk to the raid of the night before; and invited us to come up for a night's sleep in a civilized bed in the hospital. We were quartered for the night with the Ambulance boys, sleeping in a barn loft, so naturally, we accepted her invitation. Just as we were leaving to get our baggage, out into the court came the Eager Soul bearing a letter. We did not see the address, but it was, alas, plainly dimpled in her face, for the Gilded Youth to see, and after greeting him only pleasantly, she handed the letter to us, saying: "Would you be good enough to deliver this for me at Gonrecourt next week, as you are passing? It is to a friend I met on the boat!"

"Yes," said Henry; "one meets so many nice people on the boat."

"Sometimes," she answered, as she turned to her work.

That night we slept like logs until after midnight; then the moon rose, and the hospital began to come to life. The stir and murmur of the place wakened us. And we realized what a moonlight night means in a hospital near the front line. It means terror. No one slept after moonrise. It was a new experience for Henry and me. So we rose and met it. And we realized that in scores of hospitals all over the war zone, on the side of the allies, similar scenes were enacting. The Germans were literally tearing the nerves out of hundreds of nurses by their raiding campaign—nurses whom the raiders did not visit, but who were threatened by every moonlight night!

It must have been after two in the morning, when we saw the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth walking around the court as they used to pace the deck together. Once or twice they passed our window, and we heard their voices. They were having some sort of a tall talk on philosophical matters, which annoyed Henry. The ocean and onion soup and philosophical theorizing never seemed reasonable, normal expressions of anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he professed to believe that persons who tolerated these things would sooner or later be caught using the words "group" and "reaction" and "hypothesis," and he would have none of them. But for all that she used the word group and once confessed that she was a subscriber to the New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; so he waked me up from a doze to say: "Bill, she's putting him through the eye of the needle all right. And he's sliding through slick as goose-grease. I heard him telling her a minute ago that the war isn't for boundaries and geography; but for a restatement of human creeds. Then she said that steam and electricity have over-capitalized the world; that we are paying too highly for superintendence and that the price of superintendence must come down, and wages must come up. Then he said that he and his class will go in the fires burning out there—melted like wax. And she told him that they both had a lot of stolen goods on them—bodies and minds, and hearts cultivated at the expense of their fellow creatures whose lives had been narrowed that theirs might be broadened. And you should have heard her talk about the Young Doctor—a self-made man, who had earned his way through college and medical school, and made his own place professionally. She said he was the Herald of the New Day. Bill," sighed Henry, "what would you give if you could talk like that—again?" But from me, drowsily, came this: "Henry—do you suppose she will get around to that slapping tonight she promised him on the boat? That would be worth staying up to see!"

"She'll never slap him. He'll never need it. She's talked him clear out of the mood!"

"Yes, she has—yes, she has," came from me. And Henry insisted:

"She may have to slap the Doctor; but she has steered this boy out of the danger zone into the open sea of friendship."

"Oh, yes, she has; oh, yes, she has," came the echo from the other bed! And Henry subsided.

But the buzzing about the hospital would not let us sleep. At three o'clock evidently they were serving tea to the nurses, or lunch of some kind. The moon was shining straight down into the court; the Gilded Youth and the Eager Soul had gone in, and another couple, a stenographer and a hospital orderly were using it as a parlour.

"Queer, queer business, this love-making under the rustle of the wings of death," said Henry. A French plane flying across had filled the compound for a moment. But everyone soon recognized its peculiar buzz. Then for a few seconds from afar came the low ominous hum of the German planes. But they circled away from us. Perhaps the French drove them back. However, it was the excitement in the court that caused Henry's remark. For the young people did not deflect their monotonous course about the compound, when the sky-gazers had returned indoors. Around and around they went, talking, talking, talking, with the low insistent murmur of deeply interested people. Their nerves were taut; emotion was raw; they were young, and their blood moved riotously. And there was the moon, the moon that, since man could turn his face upward, has been the symbol of the thing called love. And now all over that long line slashed across the face of Europe, the moon is the herald of death. Men see it rise in terror, for they know that the season of the moon is the season of slaughter. Yet there they walked in the hospital yard, two unknown lovers, who were true to the moon.

Henry's next remark was: "Bill, fancy when you were young doing your courting out there where a shell is liable to wipe you out any second. We at least had the advantage of elm trees to protect us from the shafts of death."

"Do you suppose, Henry," answered his friend, "that they miss the drip of oars, the shade of the overhanging willows, the suggestive whisper of waters frisking over the ripples at the ford? How can they make love in such a place?"

"'Gold,'" replied Henry, quoting from Solomon, who was wise, "'is where you find it!'" Then we heard the insistence of the lovers' babble drawing near us again. As they turned a corner, Henry heaved a sigh at the perversity of youth in the flaunting neglect of sleep and death, which ever are vital to middle years. We both looked out to the white courtyard, heard the snarl of another plane, obviously French, but still disconcerting, saw the slow even pace of the lovers, unaffected by the approaching growl of the plane, and it came to me to quote one wiser even than Solomon: "O death, where is thy sting!"

We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down the score on our love affair. The record indicates that during the day Henry had lost; during the night he had won. He put it down in his black book against the time when we should get to Paris, where money would buy things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by day and night after night we saw much misery and were "acquainted with grief." There are so many kinds of hospitals in France! The great streams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front are divided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals into scores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, where specialists treat the various cases. The blind go one way; those dumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men with scalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fractures as the sheep from the goats. Travelling about among the hospitals one picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information; as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient man in Europe under pain. He likes to distinguish between himself and his wound and is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning, "Me? Oh, I'm right at the top form, Sir; but my leg is bothering me a bit, Sir!" The Canadian isn't so game under a roof as he is under the open sky and in the charge. And the American grunts more than he should. But here is a queer thing. The French tubercular soldier is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope. Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; but no American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. He feels he is hit hard; that it may take six months or a year to get on his feet; after that—he goes on dreaming his dream. But the tubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe.

Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a story to the effect that the Germans were inoculating the French and Belgians behind the lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked French and American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered that there was nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Germans have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis than by wasting serum on their enemies. And then, one day in a tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what the doctors meant.

We met a young man from Lille. It was his birthday; Henry bought him a bouquet. He told us his story. He said:

"Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was living in Lille with my parents. The Germans came to our house one day with their guns and took me away. They took me to a town in Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron or steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had only bran to eat!"

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it.

"Only bran," the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozen cots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard our question, came the echo of his confirmation, "Only bran to eat!" He soon caught cold, and soon the "cold" became tuberculosis, and after three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, and in due course he and five hundred others were assembled, put on a train and shipped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian in France. Three hundred thousand of these poor husks, men, women, and children, have been dumped into France in the last seven months. Two trainloads of them arrive at Evian every day. The men and women, mostly tubercular, do not tarry. They push on into France, a deadly white stream.

In time the week ended that marked our first trip to the French front. During that week we lived almost entirely in the war zone, and under war conditions. The food was good—better than good, it was excellent, but not plentiful, and the beds were clean and full of sleep. The only physical discomfort we found was in the lack of drinking water. We were warned against all local water.

My feelings on the subject of the French coffee and milk were something like Henry's antipathy to onion soup. But we both loved water with our meals. We had been vaccinated against typhoid, and we were rather insistent that we could drink any kind of water, if it was reasonably clean. But men said "this country is no place to drink water. It has been a battle-ground and a cemetery for three years." Still we insisted, and then, Mr. Norton, head of the American ambulance, told us this one: "Out behind a barrage once near the Champagne; helping the stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, and cold. But there we were. We couldn't get in. We ducked from shell hole to shell hole. Finally I found a nice deep one, with water in the bottom—oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot hole, and I stayed there; two days and nights. My canteen went dry, and for a day or two I scooped water out of the shell hole and drank it. Good enough tasting water so far as that goes, and fresh too! But at the end of the third day, I decided it wasn't agreeing with me and quit."

"Why?" we asked. "Did you leave the shell hole?"

"No—oh, no. It was a good shell hole. I stayed. But you know Fritzie came up!" he answered.

So our taste for water with our meals, which is America's choicest privilege, passed. Henry could drink the coffee, but it didn't taste good to me. The brackish red wine they served with the army ration tasted like diluted vinegar and looked like pokeberry ink. It seemed only good to put in our fountain pens. A tablespoonful would last me all day. Our week's trip ended at Monter-en-Der, where there was a hotel and an Ambulance corps unit that had been over to visit the American troops and had brought back from the commissary department much loot. Among other things was water—bottled water, pure unfermented water. And when we sat at table they brought me a bottle.

Try going seven days on pokeberry ink and boiled coffee yourself and note the reaction. Your veins will be dry; your stomach will crackle as it grinds the food. The water in that bottle, a quart bottle, evaporated. They brought another. It disappeared. They brought a third. The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the sight. No Frenchman ever drinks water with his meals, and the spectacle of this American sousing himself with water while he ate was a rare sight. The waiters gathered in the corner to watch me. Henry saw them, and motioned toward me, and tapped his forehead. They went and brought other waiters and men from the bar. He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water. So they peered in doors, through windows and stood in the diningroom corners to watch the fourth bottle go down. And when at the end of the meal the American rose, and walked through the crowd, they made way for him. A desperate man at least commands respect, whatever his delusion may be.

And that night we left the French front, and nosed our car toward Paris.

There we made preparations to go to the headquarters of the American Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation Red Cross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to the back of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of his uniform. Sex vanity expresses itself most gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me into uniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the neck and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distinguish us from the "first class fighting man," we were so proud that often five or six consecutive minutes passed when we weren't afraid of what our wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. At
times our attitude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunken rabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped into citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sad heads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Browne belts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn't break me of the habit of saluting with a newspaper or a package or a pencil in my hand. And my return of the interminable round of salutes from French, British, and Italian soldiers who throng Paris, probably insulted—all unbeknownst to me—hundreds of our allies, and made them sneer at our flag. So it seemed best for us to wear these uniforms only where soldiers congregated who would know us for the gawks that we were and forgive us our military trespasses. Then a real day came when our Red Cross duties took us to General Pershing's headquarters.



For Americans during the year 1918, "Somewhere in France," will mean the Joan of Arc country. It is not in the war zone, but lies among the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' auto ride from Paris. To reach the American "Somewhere in France" from Paris, one crosses the battle-field of the Marne, and we passed it the day after the third anniversary, when all the hundreds of roadside graves that marked the French advance were a-bloom and a-flutter with the tri-colour. Great doings were afoot the day before on that battle-field. Bands had played triumphant songs, and orators had spoken and the leaders of France—soldier and civilian—had come out and wept and France had released her emotions and was better for it. We passed through Meaux and hurried on east to St. Dizier, where we stopped for the night. We put up at a dingy little inn, filled to overflowing with as curious a company as ever gathered under one roof. Of course there were French soldiers—scores of them, mostly officers in full dress, going to the line or coming from it. Then there were fathers and mothers of soldiers and sisters and sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers bound for the front or coming home. And there we were, the only Americans in the house, with just enough French to order "des oeufs" and coffee "au lait" and "ros bif and jambon and pain" and to ask how much and then make them say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fingers. We were having engine trouble. And our car was groaning and coughing and muttering in the gloomy little court of the inn. Around the court ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, forty feet from the diningroom, was what was once the stable, and what now is the garage. Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur (from Utica, N. Y.) tried to diagnose the case, found we did not understand and then moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder American machine and the Frenchmen, discovering that, kept coming back to it. As we sat on the cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels against it and bemoaning the follies of youth which had corrupted our Freshman and Sophomore French, there came and sat beside us a pretty woman. She had black snappy eyes, fresh dark skin, and jet black hair, so curly that it was almost frowsy. She listened to us for a moment, then hopped aboard our talk like a boy flipping a street car: "Kansas—eh? I once lived in Oklahoma City. My father ran the Bee Hive!"

"Angels of mercy, angels of light!" This from me. "Say, will you interpret for us?"

"Sure mike! sir," she said. And then added: "And if it's engine trouble my husband upstairs is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?" And when she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to get a look into a twelve-cylinder American car. Henry stood by him, and with the woman acting as interlocutor, between our driver and her husband we soon had the trouble located and the dissimulator—Henry maintains that all engine trouble is connected in some way with a dissimulator—rectified, and while the job was going on, he expounded the twelve cylinders to the French, puffed on his dreadnaught pipe, and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me. She was keen for talk. Between her official communiques to her husband and our driver, she got in this:

"Yes, I know Frank Wickoff in Oklahoma City—knew him when he was poor as Job's turkey, and then my folks used to borrow money at his bank. Before we came to Oklahoma City we lived in Austin. We ran the Good Luck, or was it the Fair; no, we ran the Fair in Dallas." At a quick look at her face from me she laughed and said: "Oh, yes, I'm Jew all right. No," she returned to a query, "I never was in Wichita. But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take the Beacon!"

"Henry, come here," came the call from me. "Here is old Subscriber and Constant Reader!" Then Henry came up and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more. For Henry took the witness. And the three of us, kicking our heels on the cement wall below us, sat swapping yarns about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seems that in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from town to town on market day with notions and runs a little notion wagon through the country between times. She told us of an air raid of the night before on St. Dizier where eleven people had been killed and urged us to stay for the funeral the next day. It was to be a sight worth seeing. Most of the dead were women and children. There was nothing military in the little town but the two hotels that housed soldiers and their friends and relatives going to the front and coming back. Yet the Germans had come, dropped a score of bombs on the town, then had flown away for another town, dropping their hateful eggs across country as they went. Luneville had lost half a dozen, Fismes half a score, and other towns of the neighbourhood, accordingly—all civilians, mostly women and children; and not a town raided had any military works or if it had a munition factory, the bombs had hit miles from the plants.



We were beginning to realize slowly what a hell of torture and disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce choked with the offering to the war god; soldiers filling the highways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the space upon the railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; and always talk of the war—of nothing, absolutely nothing but the war and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curse proves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shrouded torches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really means to the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we at home would react under the terrific punishment which these people are taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homes crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners going about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporia act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless children and children born out of wedlock among the things that one had to face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought we were wearying of her. For she rose and said, "Well, good-night, gents—pleasant dreams!"

Pleasant dreams—indeed!

But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty plain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in the background were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and the thing was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscape is too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene might have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking girls in nighties to dance on the grass of the middle distance! American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken; a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are not indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they might come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged ready for the dance!

The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery, unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream! And then, after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America! Now America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. As we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized and blood raw—a farmer boy—bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with the Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at a forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called "Hi" as we passed, and then we knew that "our flag was still there" and that we were near our troops.

The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood. For in the next village, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our American Red Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy. Henry wanted a match. He could talk no French but a little boy at the inn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlighted pipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches. Henry gave the boy a franc—more to be amiable than anything else. The boy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch! And just as we were pulling out of the village the boy came running to us with another little blue box of matches. We thought the boy had discovered that matches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparing to make his fortune. So Henry took the box, and as the car was moving handed the boy another franc. We noticed him waving his hands and shaking his head. And when we were a mile out of the village Henry opened his second box and found his original franc in it. The boy's mother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box of matches, and had made him bring back the money with another box to show how much the French appreciate the Americans coming to France. We met many instances like that.

Soon the road was cluttered up with American soldiers. They were driving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths and sweating copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered in passing what an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thought of the two-wheeled French carts they were using. Then we turned the corner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of American soldiers quartered in a French village. They were busy building barracks. We stopped and visited them, and they showed us their quarters: In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacant stores—everywhere that human beings could slip in, the American soldiers had installed themselves. The Y.M.C.A. hut was finished, and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-time on the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking American women at the counter across one end of the room. An Irish Catholic padre in a major's uniform was in charge of the sports of the camp and he literally permeated the Y.M.C.A. hut. He was the leader of the men. The little village where this troop lived faded into the plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to another and another and still another. At that time thirteen villages in an arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops. We stopped many times on our long day's journey. Once we stopped for mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our first estrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, "how light a thing may move dissension between hearts that love—hearts that the world in vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied." Well—the thing that came between us was cooking—cooking that has parted more soul mates than any other one thing in the world! For two weeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eating at country hotels or country homes in France, eating good French country cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal typically was a melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a small bit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree—peas, spinach, served dry and minced, or string beans; then raw fruit, and cheese. The bread, of course, was black war bread, but crusty and fine. That was my idea of a lunch for the gods. What we got at the American mess was this: a thick, frowsy, greasy soup—a kind of larded dishwater; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans with fried bacon laid on the beans—not pork and beans, but called pork and beans—with the beans slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce, cabbage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread cut an inch thick, soft and spongy, boiled potatoes that had stood in the water after they were cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by pouring water on bread, sticking in some raisins, stirring in an egg, and serving a floury syrup over it for sauce! There was enough, of course, to keep soul and body together. But the cooking had spoiled a lot of mighty good food. And Henry liked it! There were two preachers with us, and they bragged about the "good old American cooking!" And when they heard me roar they said, "He is insulting the star-spangled banner," and Henry threatened to take my pajamas out of his black valise!



After passing through many villages crowded with our troops we came to the headquarters of the American Expeditionary forces. We found General Pershing in a long brick building—two or three stories high, facing a wide white parade ground. The place had been used evidently as a barracks for French soldiers in peace times, and was fitted to the uses of our army. We met a member of his staff, a sort of outer guard, and with scarcely a preliminary halt were taken to the general. He seems easy of access, which is a sign that he plays no favourites and has no court. Anyone with business can see him. He met us in a plain bare room with a square new American-looking desk in the midst of it. He sat behind the desk, cordial enough but with the air of one who will be pleased to have business start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged straight to the business in hand. We were from the American Red Cross in Paris, and our leader had come to get a definite idea of what part the Red Cross was to play in the recreation activities of the army. The Y. M. C. A. was spending millions upon recreation problems. The Red Cross had millions to spend.

Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier hostels, homes, clubs, houses where American soldiers can go while in Paris on leave of absence. The Red Cross had one single donation of one million dollars to be devoted to a club for American soldiers in Paris. The Y. M. C. A had started to equip two or three great Parisian hotels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated for certain other recreation purposes in camp. The Y. M. C. A. believed it should control the camp and Parisian recreation activities of the American troops.

We stated our case about as briefly as it is here written, and in three minutes. In two minutes more General Pershing had assured us that there would be no need to spend money for hotels or clubs in Paris, that few soldiers would be given leave to go to Paris, and that the lavish expenditure of American money in Paris would be bad for America's standing in France.

And then he allotted the recreation problems of men in the hospitals to the Red Cross, and the recreation enterprises for men outside of hospitals to the Y. M. C. A.

He was brief, exact, candid and final. He stood for the most part, as he talked; spoke low, fumbled for no word, and looked into his hearers' eyes. The politician looks over their shoulders. We spoke for two or three minutes with him about the work of our troops this winter, and were impressed with the decision of the man. He seemed—perhaps subconsciously—afraid that public opinion at home would demand that he put our men into the trenches to hold their own sector too early. He evidently believed that during our first winter the men should go in by squads and perhaps companies or later in regimental units for educational purposes, working with the English and the French learning the trench game. But we felt clearly that he believed strongly that it would be spring before we should occupy any portion of the line ourselves. There was a firmness about him, not expressed in words. No one could say that he had said what we thought he had conveyed to us. Yet each of us was sure that the General would not be moved from his decision. He breathes confidence in him into people's hearts. He never seems confidential; though he is entirely candid. Again one feels sure that there is no court around him. He seems wise with his own wisdom, which is constantly in touch with the wisdom of everyone who may have business with him. He will not be knocked off his feet; he will do no military stunts. The American soldiers will not go into action until we have enough troops to hold our part of the line and we will not start an offensive until we can back it up. This all came glowing out of the firm, kind, wise, soldierly face of General Pershing, and it needed no words to verify it. Superfluous words might have contradicted the message of his mien; for they might have added boast to simple statement.

It is all so orderly, so organized, so American, this thing we are doing in France. It is like the effective manipulation of a great trust. The leadership of the American forces in France in the army and in the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. is made up of men known all over the United States; the names of those leaders who are soldiers may not be mentioned. They have dropped out of American civilian life so quietly that they are scarcely missed. Yet for weeks we lived in the hotel with one of the prominent figures in American finance who is working eighteen hours a day buying supplies, assembling war material—food, fuel, clothing—putting up scores of miles of barracks, building a railroad from tidewater to the American headquarters, equipping it with American engines, freight cars, and passenger coaches; sinking piles for the first time in a harbour which has been occupied for two thousand years, and unloading great ships there which were supposed to be too big for that port. He is the marvel of the French. Hundreds like him are over there lending a hand. They are about to handle in a year an army half as large as the other allies have been three years building. Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation, communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation—the whole routine of life for a million men and more must be provided in advance by these organizing men. This work, so far as these men consider it, is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing comforts at home, money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practically for nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor's wise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of passing fame. For their names may not be mentioned in the news of what the Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wherever one goes in Europe he is running across these first-class men. Their sincerity and patriotism may not be questioned.

But they are getting something real out of it all. The renewal of youth in their faces through unstinted giving is beautiful to see. They are going into a new adventure—a high and splendid adventure, and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut, will never be the same lives that they were before.

But here is a story, an American story which has in it the makings of a hero tale. It came to us in Paris, bit by bit. We saw it and no one told it to us. Yet here it is, and it should begin in form. Once upon a time in America when the people were changing their gods, a certain major god of finance named James Hazen Hyde, head of a great insurance company, fell into disfavour; and the people, changing their gods, cast him away. If men had been serving the old gods they would have said, "Go it while you're young," to the youth, but instead they said unpleasant things. So he went to France and vanished from the map, but he did not entirely understand why he was banished. He had done nothing that other young gods did not do and he was amazed, but he faded. He lived in Paris as an exile, not as a god, and he couldn't for the life of him tell why. But when the war came he had a mighty human desire to serve his country; just to serve, mind you, not to be exalted. He was fifty years old, too old to pack a rifle; too old to mount an airship; too old to stop a bullet without taking two or three other good men and true, younger than he, to watch him. So he had hard work to find service. Then along came the American Red Cross and it wanted servants—not major generals, not even captains; but just chauffeurs and interpreters and errand boys and things. And young Jimmy Hyde, who had been the Prince of Wales of the younger gods of fashionable finance, and who was cast out when the people changed their gods, came to Red Cross headquarters with his two cars, and offered them and himself to serve. And they put him in a uniform, with a Sam Browne belt, and a Red Cross on his cap; and it was after all his country's uniform, and he was a servant of his country. And men say that even in the days of his young godhood he was not so happy, nor did his face shine in such pride as it shines today. For he is a man. He serves.

After our visit to the American troops we went down to Domremy, the birth place of Joan of Arc. It was good to view her from the aspect of her Old Home Town. There is a church, restored, where she worshipped, and the home where she was born and lived. It was a better house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and indicates that her people were rather of more consequence than common. We visited the home, went into the church, and walked in the garden where she met the angel; but we met postcard vendors instead. Yet it is a fair garden, back from the road, half hidden by a wall, and in it is a lovely drooping tree. A fair place it was indeed for an angel to choose. Some way Joan leaves me without much enthusiasm. Perhaps it is because she has had two good friends who have done her bad turns. The Pope, who made her a saint, and Mark Twain, who made her human. It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did her the worse service. Some way, it seems to me, she could live in our hearts more beautifully in the remote and noble company of myths like the lesser gods, made by men to express their deepest yearnings for the beautiful in life. The pleasant land in which she lived, the gentle hills whereon she watched her flocks, and the tender sky of France, all made me happy, and if Joan did not get to me, perhaps it was because one can take away from a place only what he brings there.

When we left Domremy, the hills—soft green hills, high but never rugged, stretched away in the misty purple distance and we dropped into those vales where Joan watched her sheep and heard the voices. It did not seem impossible, nor even difficult to hear voices amid such beauty. So we fell to discussing the voices that reach this world. And Henry said: "Always there are voices in this earth—always they come in youth, calling us forward and upward. And if we follow them, though they lead to long marches and hard bivouacs, and to humiliation and sorrow, yet are we happy and triumphant."

"But Germany?" insisted someone. "Where were her voices?"

"Her voices came when Heine sang, and Beethoven made music, and Goethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought! If ever a land had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy Germany had it. Democracy tried to bloom in the revolutionary days of the forties, but Germany strangled her voices. And now—"

"And now there are no voices in the world!" sighed one of our party; but even as he spoke from out of the purple distance came the thin faint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills. It was an American bugle. And Henry caught its significance, and cried: "There is the new voice—the voice that the world must follow if we find the old peace again on earth."



CHAPTER V

IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS "BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT"

At the close of one fair autumn day our car developed tire trouble, in a village "Somewhere in France," not far from the headquarters of the American Army. There are four excellent reasons for deleting the name of the town. First, the censor might not like to have it printed; second, because the name of the place has escaped my memory; third, because there is a munition factory there and it should not be mentioned, and fourth, because even if the name of the place returned to me, its spelling would get lost in transit. In passing it should be said in this connection that it seemed to Henry and me that the one thing France really needed was a pronounceable language and phonetic spelling. The village where we stopped really was not a village in the Kansas sense; it was twice as big as Emporia and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is 70,000. But the thing that made the place seem like a village to us was the town crier. As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum and crying the official news of the sugar ration; he was telling the people where they could get sugar, how much they should pay for it and how much they should use for each member of a family a month.

"Why," asked Henry of an English speaking bystander, "don't you put that in your daily newspaper; why keep up the old custom?"

"We have no daily newspaper," answered the inhabitant.

"All right, then, is there any reason why the news won't wait for the weekly?" asked Henry.

"And we have no weekly and no monthly and no annual. We have no newspaper in this town."

That stumped us both. In America every town of five thousand has its daily newspaper, and frequently two dailies, and in the West every town of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper. With us the newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. A community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper—and we found that this community never had supported a newspaper—was unthinkable to us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they know about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told us that the churches recorded those things. How do they know about the scandal? And we remembered that scandal was older than the press; it was the father of the press, as the devil is the father of lies. How do they know how to vote? And they told us that newspapers hindered rather than helped that function. How did they record local history? And in our hearts, we knew who had recorded so much local history, that most of it is not worth recording and that tradition takes care of what is left. But how did they manage to create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the city waterworks, to establish the public library, to enforce the laws, to organize the Chamber of Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that or the other public benevolence? And men shook their heads and said: Water has run down hill many years; perhaps it will keep on running, even without a newspaper.



It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who thought our calling was a torch-bearer of civilization. Indeed, one may digress and say that we found the whole estate of the press in France rather disenchanting. For advertising is not regarded as entirely "ethical" in France. The big stores sometimes do not advertise at all; because people look with the same suspicion on advertising drygoods and clothing merchants as we in America look upon advertising lawyers and doctors. So newspapers too often have to sell their editorial opinions, and the press has small influence in France, compared with the influence of the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon countries.

But in that French village of twenty-five thousand people without a newspaper we found a civilization that compared favourably with the civilization in any American town. While the tire was going on it developed that a cog had slipped in the transgression of the car—or something of the sort, so we were laid up for an hour, and we piled out of our seats and took in the town. We found four good bookstores there—rather larger than our bookstores at home. We found two or three big co-operative stores largely patronized by industrial workers and farmers, and they were better stores by half than any cooperative stores we had seen in America. For with us the co-operative store is generally a sad failure. Our farmers talk big about cooperation, but they sneak around and patronize the stores that offer the best bargains, and our industrial workers haven't begun to realize how co-operative buying will help them. We found no big stores, in the American sense, but we found many bright, well-kept shops. In electrical supplies we found the show windows up to the American average, which is high indeed; but in plumbing there was a sag. We discovered that the town had comparatively few sewers. The big, white-tiled bathroom with its carload of modern fixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber's shop in every American town—we missed. The bathtub is not a household need in France. Yet some way we surmised that if our towns could have better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easier in our minds for the palladiums of our liberties. And it can't be laid to the picture shows—this slump in the American book reading average; for the French towns are just as full of picture shows as American towns. That superiority in bookstores which lies with the French over the Americans, should give us pause. It more than overbalances our superiority in country newspapers. And then as we walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering upon these things we came to the town park.

It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street—"right in the heart of the city," we would say at home. Everyone in town who moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had to pass through that park. In it were certain long rows of grey-barked trees—trees with trunks that shimmered like the trunks of sycamores, but that rose sheer from the ground forty feet before branching, and then spread widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage. One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "From the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thought of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a good thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily newspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall. For it called incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the things outside ourselves that make for righteousness in this earth. We in America, we in the everlasting Wichitas and Emporias, are prone to feel that we can make for righteousness what or when we will by calling an election, by holding a public meeting, by getting a president, a secretary and a committee on ways and means, by voting the bonds! But they who walk daily through groves like this, must in very spite of themselves give some thought to the hand that "reared these venerable columns and that thatched the verdant roof!" Now in every French town, we did not find a grove like this. But in every French town we did find something to take its place, a historic spot marked with a beautiful stone or bronze; a gently flowing river, whose beauty was sacredly guarded; a group of old, old buildings that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grown almost like the woods themselves, out of the visions of men into the dreams of men. And these dumb teachers of men have put into the soul of France a fine and exquisite spirit. It rose at the Marne and made a miracle.

And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France. Essentially it is altruistic. Men are not living for themselves. They are living for something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyond the objects of their personal affection. Men are living and dying today not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends or families, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritual thing called France. We Americans who go to France are agreed that we have never in our lives seen anything like the French in this season of their anguish. They are treading the winepress as no other modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' blood into the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of course, as they do their hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers. Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He took them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. They grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916 they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revolt whispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They will not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In their hearts they are brave.

Over and over again as we went about France were we impressed with the courage and the tenacity of the French. By very contrast with their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to loom large and definite and certain. We met Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one of the best of the younger American novelists. She told us a most illuminating story. She has been two years in France working with the blind, and later superintending the commissary department of a training camp for men in the American Field Ambulance service. She is a shrewd and wise observer, with a real sense of humour, and Heaven knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets the truth out of the veneer of tragedy that surfaces the situation. [Footnote: This story appeared in Everybody's Magazine in Dorothy Canfield's own words.] It seems that she was riding into Paris from her training camp recently, and being tired went to sleep in her compartment, in which were two civilians, too old for military service. She was awakened by a wrangle and then—but let her tell it:

"Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their heads in our window shaking a beret and asking for contributions to help them enjoy their week's leave of absence in Paris. My two elderly Frenchmen had given a little, under protest, saying (what was perfectly true) that it would go for drink and wouldn't do the poilus any good. And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the fat bourgeois who stayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn't give a helping hand to the poor soldier on rest leave! To get rid of them, I put a franc in the beret. This was received with acclamations, and they inquired to whom should they drink a toast with the money. I said, 'Oh, give a good Vive l'Amerique. That'll suit me best!' They both shouted, 'Oh, is Madame an American?' And to the dismay of the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another through the window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing on the running-board all this time with the train going forty miles an hour...a thing which was simply unheard-of in France before the war...one of the 'privileges' which the poilu take!). Well, they shook hands with me two or three times over and assured me they had never seen an American before...and indeed the two bourgeois looked at me curiously. Then one of them began to talk boisterously, expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with a liberty of phrase which wasn't conventional at all, another poilu privilege! They sat down, evidently for a long visit. They were typical specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, quite eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower classes, the kind which leaves its shirt open at the neck over a hairy chest and calls itself proudly 'the proletariat.' The other was a fresh-faced, vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds to the middle western American, a kind of Emporian! He hadn't much to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose. They both, through all their roughness and coarseness and evident excitement over starting on their 'permission,' had that French instinctive social tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women from being afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and they were both very sincere, and desperately trying to express something of the strange confusion that is in everybody's mind ever since the war...what are we all doing anyhow!"



"Here are some of the things the fluent Paris 'cockney' said...for the type corresponds in Paris to the lower-class cockney of London.

"'See here, you know, we've had enough of it...WE CAN'T STAND IT ANY MORE! I'm just back from the Chemin des Dames...you know what that's been for the last month'...then he gave me a terrible description of that battle...'how do you expect men to go back to that...do you know what happens to you when you live for twenty-thirty days like that?...you go mad! Yes, THAT'S what happens to you...that's what's the trouble with me now...I know I sound wild. I am wild...I CAN'T stand any more...it's more than flesh and blood can endure to go back into that! Why don't the Americans GET in it if they are going to? Oh, yes, I know they can't any sooner...but why didn't they get IN, before! Oh, yes, I know why. I know...but when you are mad you can't stop to reason. We look at it this way...When we're not mad, from having been too many days under fire...we say, as we talk it over...There are the English...they've done splendidly...they've taken two years, it is true, to get their army really in shape...but they didn't have anything to begin with...they're fine...all that we could expect. But all the same, during the two years, Frenchmen were dying like flies...just watering the whole North with blood...yes, I've seen a brook run red just like the silly poems that nobody believed. And the Americans...yes...suppose this man and I should get to quarrelling. Of course you can't jump right in and decide which is to blame, if you don't know much about the beginning. You HAVE to stand off and watch, and see which fights fair, and all the rest...BUT WHILE YOU ARE DECIDING, ALL FRANCE IS DYING. It is time the weight of the defence is taken off France...there won't be any Frenchmen left alive in France...and here she is with all these foreigners over-running her! Do you suppose they are going to leave after the war? Not much. All these Algerians and Senegals and Anamites—not to speak of the Belgians and English and Americans...there won't be any Frenchmen left alive, and France will be populated by foreigners...THAT'S what we have to look forward to for all the reward of our blood. They keep promising help, but they don't bring it. WE have to go back and go back! I tell you, Ma'ame, THREE YEARS IS TOO LONG A TIME! No man can stand three years of war! It makes you into somebody else... you've died so many times you're like a walking corpse...isn't that just how you feel?' he appealed to his companion, who said impassively,

"'No, damn you, that isn't a bit how I feel. I just say to myself, "IT'S WAR" and "THAT'S THE WAY WAR IS," and I don't TRY to make anything out of it the way you do. That's silly! You just have to stick it out. Understanding it hasn't anything to do with it.'

"The first one went off on another tack...still wilder and more incoherent. 'It's the capitalists...that's what it is...they saw that the people...the proletariat...that's ME,' with a thump of his fist on his chest, 'had begun to see too clearly how things were going and so they stirred up this hornet's nest to blind everybody...for in war even more than in peace (and that's saying a good deal)...it's the proletariat that bears the burdens. Who do you think is in the trenches now...is the bourgeois class? NO! It's the labouring class. One by one, the bourgeois have slipped out of it. Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in hospitals... anything but to stay out in the front-line trenches with us poor rats of working-people! Isn't that so?'

"He appealed to his companion, who answered again very calmly (it was extraordinary how they didn't seem to mind differing diametrically from each other. I suppose they had the long habit of arguing together). 'No, it's not so! In my company there are as many bourgeois as labouring men.'

"The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denials of everything he was saying. 'It's the proletariat that always pays...isn't it so, Ma'ame! Peace or war, old times or new, it's always the poor who pay all the debts! And they're doing it to such a tune now in France that there won't be any left, when the war is over... oh, it's got to stop. There's no use talking about it...and it WILL, too, one of these days...who CARES how it stops! Life...any sort of life...is better than anything else.'

"At this the other soldier said, 'Don't pay any attention to him, Madame, he always goes on so...but he'll stick it out just the same. We all will. That's the nature of the Frenchman, Madame. He must have his grievance. He must grumble and grumble but when it's necessary, he goes forward just the same...Only he has to talk such a lot before!'

"'Oh, yes, we'll HOLD them, fast enough!' agreed the first one. 'We'll never let them get past us!' (This type of declaring poilu is much given to contradicting himself flatly!) 'But never, never, NEVER an offensive again, from the French...you SEE, Madame—Never again an offensive from the French! They've done their share! They've done more than their share. Never an offensive. We'll hold till the Americans get here, but not more!'

"We were pulling into the station at Meaux by this time, and as the train stood there waiting, I heard a sound that brought my heart up into my mouth...the sound of a lot of young men's voices singing an American College song! Everybody sprang to the windows and there was a group of American boys, in their nice new uniforms, singing at the tops of their voices, and putting their heads together like a college glee-club. Their clear young voices completely filled that great smoky station and rang out with the most indescribably confident inspiriting effect! 'Good God!' cried the dingy, battered soldier at my elbow, 'how little they know what they are going into!' The soldier from Bourgogne said nothing, but looked very stern and sad. The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, the other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and those splendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic episode imaginable. There was America—there was France.

"It changed the current of the talk. After that we talked all together, the two bourgeois joining in...sober talk enough, of probabilities and hopes and fears.

"As I walked home at one o'clock in the morning through the silent black streets of Paris, turning over and over what that poor disinherited slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as earnestly and simply as he had poured out all his disgust and revolt, 'Good-bye, Ma'ame, I never met an American before. I hope I'll meet many more. You tell the Americans the FRENCH WILL SEE IT THROUGH...if a new offensive is necessary...we'll do it! It's the only chance anybody has to have a world fit to live in!'"

When she had finished her story, Dorothy Canfield concluded something like this: "That's what they all come back to, after their fit of utter horror at their life is over. It does them good, apparently, to talk it all out to a patient listener. They always, always end by saying that even what they are living through is better than a world commanded by the Germans...what a perfectly amazing distrust that nation has accumulated against itself!"

They are sick of war; war weary and sad. Yet they will fight on. The will to fight is outside the individual will; yet it is not the will of the leaders, nor is it the will of the many combined in a common will. For the many are tired unto death of war. But for all that they will fight on without flinching. It is the national will—the will deeper than the will of leaders, stronger than the molten will of the many in one purpose. It is the tradition of centuries; it is the unexpressed purpose, perhaps unconscious habit of an old, old people, united far down in the roots of them; not so much by race, for the Franks are of many breeds; not so much by industrial or geographical ties or even political unity, though it approaches that; but bound most surely by the sense of national tradition. A people is fighting. From a thousand villages with their primeval temples, with their lovely cathedrals grown out of the hearts of the race buried in the shadow of their spires, from the shining rivers that flow through green pastures, from soft hills rich in folk tales of heroes, come the millions; and from Paris, ever radiant in her venerable youth, come other millions who make this fighting soul of the nation. What if it grumbles as it fights; it will still fight on. Of course it is sick of war; but it will not stop. It is a spirit that is fighting in France, the spirit of a brave people.