THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME

BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

Author of "A Certain Rich Man, " etc. 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY TONY SARG

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

 II IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"

 III IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER "BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR"

 IV WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

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

 VI WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY

 VII WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION

VIII IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"

 IX IN WHICH WE RETURN TO "THE LAND OF THE FREE"

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can beworn at most only two months

"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir"

She often paced the rounds of the deck between us

"Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?"

So we waved back at them so long as they were in sight

"Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame toot sweet aboutit!"

Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe

One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout

"Come on! Let's go to the abri!"

So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer forceof will and both hands!

He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated fora second at his inconvenience

"Oh, yes, " answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs. Chessman--this is practically her hospital"

He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water

Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the lady from OklahomaCity to me

And he sat cross-legged

As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum

They were standing on the running board all this time with thetrain going forty miles an hour

"What part of the States do you Canadians come from?"

He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening toanother man's story in his own mouth

A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform withoutlooking like a sack of meal

He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coatof glaring scarlet broadcloth

We thought he might be testing us out as potential spies

And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky partyand dropped into a grand ball

"Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to LordBryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?"

THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

By rights Henry, being the hero of this story, should be introducedin the first line. But really there isn't so much to say aboutHenry--Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas--Henry J. Allen, editor and owner of the Wichita Beacon. And to make the dramatispersonae complete, we may consider me as the editor of the EmporiaGazette, and the two of us as short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inlandAmericans, from fresh water colleges in our youth and arrived atNew York by way of an often devious, yet altogether happy route, leading through politics where it was rough going and unprofitablefor years; through business where we still find it easy to sign, possible to float and hard to pay a ninety-day note, and throughtwo country towns; one somewhat less than one hundred thousandpopulation, and Emporia slightly above ten thousand. 

We are discovered in the prologue to the play in New York City wearingour new silk suits to give New York a treat on a hot August day. Not that we or any one else ever wears silk suits in any Wichitaor Emporia; silk suits are bought by Wichita people and Emporiansall over the earth to paralyse the natives of the various New Yorks. 

In our pockets we hold commissions from the American Red Cross. These commissions are sending us to Europe as inspectors with aview to publicity later, one to speak for the Red Cross, the otherto write for it in America. We have been told by the Red Crossauthorities in Washington that we shall go immediately to the frontin France and that it will be necessary to have the protectivecolouring of some kind of an army uniform. The curtain rises on astore in 43rd Street in New York--perhaps the "Palace" or the "Hub"or the "Model" or the "Army and Navy, " where a young man is tryingto sell us a khaki coat, and shirt and trousers for $17. 48. Andat that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be wornat most only two months. But we compromise by making him throw inanother shirt and a service hat and we take the lot for $17. 93 andgo away holding in low esteem the "pride, pomp and circumstance ofglorious war" as exemplified by these military duds. In our heartsas we go off at R. U. E. Will be seen a hatred for uniforms assuch, and particularly for phoney uniforms that mean nothing andcost $18. 00 in particular. 

[Illustration with caption: And at that it seems a lot of money topay for a rig which can be worn at most only two months]

And then, with a quick curtain, the good ship Espagne, a Frenchliner, is discovered in New York harbour the next day with Henryand me aboard her, trying to distinguish as she crawfishes out ofthe dock, the faces of our waving friends from the group upon thepier. 

The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and scooting through thenight, with two or three hundred others of the cast of charactersaboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters, and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity ofevil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act, splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for threethousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicasof Wichita and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and the manthat this story is written, nor of Henry and me, and the war; butit is the eternal Wichita and Emporia in the American heart thatwe shall celebrate hereinafter as we unfold our tale. Of course, that makes it provincial. And people living in New York or Boston, or Philadelphia (but not Chicago, for half of the people there havejust come to town and the other half is just ready to leave town)may not understand this story. For in some respects New York islarger than Wichita and Emporia; but not so much larger; for merenumbers of population amount to little. There is always an angle ofthe particular from which one can see it as a part of the universal;and seen properly the finite is always infinite. And that bringsus back naturally to Henry and me, looking out at the scurryingstars in the ocean as we hurried through the black night on thegood ship Espagne. We had just folded away a fine Sunday dinner, aFrench Sunday dinner, beginning with onion soup which was strange;and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blastof trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soupwas threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner thatnight ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboardthe boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the valueof food as a two-way commodity--going down and coming up--butlater in the dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one-wayluxury, with small thought as to its other uses. So we leaned againstthe rail in the night and thought large thoughts about Wichita andEmporia. 

Here we were, two middle-aged men, nearing fifty years, going outto a ruthless war without our wives. We had packed our own valisesat the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. We realizedthat probably we were leaving half our things in closets anddrawers and were taking the wrong things with us, and checking theright things in our trunks at our hotels in New York. We had somediscussion about our evening clothes, and on a toss-up had decidedto take our tails and leave our dinner coats in the trunks. Butwe didn't know why we had abandoned our dinner coats. We had noaccurate social knowledge of those things. Henry boasted that hiswife had taught him a formula that would work in the matter of whiteor black ties with evening clothes. But it was all complicated withwhite vests and black vests and sounded like a corn remedy; yet itwas the only sartorial foundation we had. And there we were withland out of sight, without a light visible on the boat, standingin the black of night leaning over the rail, looking at the starsin the water, and wondering silently whether we had packed our bestcuff buttons, "with which to harry our foes, " or whether we mighthave to win the war in our $17. 93 uniforms, and we both thoughtand admitted our shame, that our wives would think we had "beenextravagant in putting so much money into those uniforms. The admirableFrench dinner which we had just enveloped, seemed a thousand milesaway. It was a sad moment and our thoughts turned naturally tohome. 

"Fried chicken, don't you suppose?" sighed Henry. 

"And mashed potatoes, and lots of thick cream gravy!" came fromthe gloom beside him. 

"And maybe lima beans, " he speculated. 

"And a lettuce salad with thousand island dressing, I presume!"came out of the darkness. 

"And apple dumpling--green apple dumpling with hard sauce, " welledup from Henry's heavy heart. It was a critical moment. If it hadkept on that way we would have got off the boat, and trudged backhome through a sloppy ocean, and let the war take care of itself. Then Henry's genius rose. Henry is the world's greatest kidder. Give him six days' immunity in Germany, and let him speak in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Leipsic and Cologne and he would kid the divineright of kings out of Germany and the kaiser on to the Chautauquacircuit, reciting his wrongs and his reminiscences!

Henry, you may remember, delivered the Roosevelt valedictory at theChicago Republican convention in 1912, when he kidded the standpatcrowd out of every Republican state in the union but two at theelection. Possibly you don't like that word kid. But it's in thedictionary, and there's no other word to describe Henry's talent. He is always jamming the allegro into the adagio. And that nightin the encircling gloom on the boat as we started on our martialadventures he began kidding the ocean. His idea was that he wouldget Wichita to vote bonds for one that would bring tide water toMain Street. He didn't want a big ocean--just a kind of an oceanettewith a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea, and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps thatrose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken andmashed potatoes of our dream, had vanished. 

And so we fell to talking about our towns. It seems that we hadeach had the same experience. Henry declared that, from the day itwas known he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the town hadset him apart; he was somewhat like the doomed man in a hanging andpeople were always treating him with distinguished consideration. He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the town boomer, had the memorialservices all worked out--who would sing "How Sleep the Brave, "who would play Chopin's funeral march on the pipe organ, who woulddeliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would sendaround to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocksto print the eulogy in full and on the first page! Henry employsan alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whetherhe had decided to use "Wichita Weeps, " or "State Stands Sorrowing. "If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that wouldrequire a deck head. We could not decide, so we began talking ofserious things. 

How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn dayswhen the man who went to France was a hero in his town's eyes. Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passeddown America's main streets, all headed for France. And what proudpageants they were! Walking at the head of the line were the littlelimping handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came themiddle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, soboyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--thevolunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; halfaccoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigiblyyoung. There had been banquets the week before, and speeches andflag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tearsand good-byes across the land. And all this in a few weeks; indeedit began during the long days in which we two sailed through thegulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed sucha bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town uponan unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundredleave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger insome way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbersoften multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and meon the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses andambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. Workers. No particular advantagewould come to the German arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne, carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on mercifulerrands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon, we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an internedleviathan of the sea in her dock. We had been told of how cunningly theGermans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electricwires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source, how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship, how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts androds far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they hadscientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not makesteam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, afloating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prizeshe would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with thosehandsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the countryas they went to their training camps. Even to consider these thingsgave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boatin the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it hadcome before. And then our first real martial adventure happened, thus:

As we leaned over the rail that first night talking of many things, in the blackness, without a glimmer from any porthole, with thedecks as dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots anhour. In peace times it would be regarded as a crazy man's deed, to go whizzing along at full speed without lights. Henry had takentwo long puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind us camea hand that tapped his shoulder, and then a voice spoke:

"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A submarine could see thatfive miles on a night like this!"

So Henry doused his light, and the war came right home to us. 

The next day was uniform day on the boat, and the war came a bitnearer to us than ever. Scores of good people who had come on theboat in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day;mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. Or American ambulance or Field Serviceuniforms. We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed thatwe should at least have a dress rehearsal. The only regular uniformson board were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, stragglinghome from a French political mission to America, and these Frenchsoldiers were the only passengers on the boat who had errandsto France connected with the destructive side of the war. So notuntil the uniforms blazed out gorgeously did we realize what anelaborate and important business had sprung up in the reconstructiveside of war. Here we saw a whole ship's company--hundreds of busyand successful men and women, one of scores and scores of ship'scompanies like it, that had been hurrying across the ocean everyfew days for three years, devoted not to trading upon the war, notto exploiting the war, not even to expediting the business of "thegentle art of murdering, " but devoted to saving the waste of war!

As the days passed, and "we sailed and we sailed, " a sort ofdenatured pirate craft armed to the teeth with healing lotions tomassage the wrinkled front of war, Henry kept picking at the ocean. It was his first transatlantic voyage; for like most American men, he kept his European experiences in his wife's name. So the oceanbothered him. He understood a desert or a drouth, but here was atremendous amount of unnecessary and unaccountable water. It wasa calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at it for a longtime one day, Henry remarked wearily: "The town boosters who securedthis ocean for this part of the country rather overdid the job!"

One evening, looking back at the level floor of the ocean stretchingillimitably into the golden sunset, he mused: "They have a finecountry here. You kind of like the lay of it, and there is plentyof nice sightly real estate about--it's a gently rolling country, uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there'sgot to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that ata glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his proposition!"

[Illustration with caption: "You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. "]

A time always comes in a voyage, when men and women begin to stepout as individuals from the mass. With us it was the Red Crossstenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased beingladyships and lordships and took their proper places in the cosmos. They were a gay lot--and young. And human nature is human nature. So the decks began to clutter up with boys and girls intenselyinterested in exploring each other's lives. It is after all themost wonderful game in the world. And while the chaperon flutteredabout more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks atnight, and while public opinion on the boat made eminently properrules against young women in the smoking room, still young blood didhave its way, which really is a good way; better than we think, perhaps, who look back in cold blood and old blood. And by the tokenof our years it was brought to us that war is the game of youth. We were two middle-aged old coots--though still in our forties andnot altogether blind to a pretty face--and yet the oldest peopleon the boat. Even the altruistic side of war is the game of youth. 

Perhaps it is the other way around, and maybe youth is the only gamein the world worth playing and that the gains of youth, service andsuccess and follies and failures, are only the chips and counters. We were brought to these conclusions more or less by a young person, a certain Miss Ingersoll, or perhaps her name only sounded likethat; for we called her the Eager Soul. And she was a pretty girl, too--American pretty: Red hair--lots of blowy, crinkly red hairthat was always threatening to souse her face and ears; blue eyesof the serious kind and a colour that gave us the impression thatshe did exercises and could jab a punching bag. Indeed before wemet her, we began betting on the number of hours it would take herto tell us that she took a cold plunge every morning. Henry expectedthe statement on the second day; as a matter of fact it came lateon the first day! She was that kind. But there was no foolishnessabout her. She was a nurse--a Red Cross nurse, and she made itclear that she had no illusions about men; we suspected that shehad seen them cut up and knew their innermost secrets! Neverthelessshe was tremendously interesting, and because she, too, was fromthe middle west, and possibly because she realized that we acceptedher for what she was, she often paced the rounds of the deck betweenus. We teased her more or less about a young doctor of the JohnsHopkins unit who sometimes hovered over her deck chair and a certainGilded Youth--every boat-load has its Gilded Youth--whose fatherwas president of so many industrial concerns, and the vice-presidentof so many banks and trust companies that it was hard to look atthe boy without blinking at his gilding. Henry was betting on theGilded Youth; so the young doctor fell to me. For the first threeor four days during which we kept fairly close tab on their time, the Doctor had the Gilded Youth beaten two hours to one. Henrybought enough lemonade for me and smoking room swill of one sortand another to start his little old Wichita ocean But it was plainthat the Gilded Youth interested her. And in a confidential momentfilled with laughter and chaff and chatter she told us why: "He'spatronizing me. I mean he doesn't know it, and he thinks I don'tknow it; but that's what he's doing. I interest him as a socialspecimen. I mean--I'm a bug and he likes to take me up and examineme. I think I'm the first 'Co-ed' he ever has seen; the firstgirl who voted and didn't let her skirts sag and still loved goodcandy! I mean that when he found in one half hour that I knew he worenine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearlyexpired; he was that puzzled! I'm not quite the type of workinggirl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but--I mean I think he iswondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind! When hedecides, " she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tuckingaway her overflowing red hair, "I may have to slap him--I meandon't you know--"

And we did know. And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizingme with odds on the Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautifulboy--tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming. Heplayed Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano inthe women's lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud pokerwith the San Francisco boys in the smoking room. And it was clearthat he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhathigher than his mother's social secretary--but of the same class. He was returning from a furlough, to drive his ambulance in France, and the Doctor was going out to join his unit somewhere in Francedown near the Joan of Arc country. He told us shyly one day, as wewatched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationedat an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, "I servebecause I am served!" When he did not repeat the motto we knew thatit had caught him. He had been at home working on a germ problemconnected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence ofMrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficultieswith the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the twoat their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge andgasped, "My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a jumped off theboat!"

[Illustration with caption: She often paced the rounds of the deckbetween us]

As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar facesand figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair ofeyes--a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. Speaking broadlyand allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes wereno treat to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes. Henrysaid if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captainshould make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. Wewere not always sure she was a Princess. At times she seemed morelike a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes. We neverhad seen such clothes! And millinery! We were used to Broadway;Michigan Avenue did not make us shy, and Henry had been in the South. But these clothes and the hats and the eyes--all full dress--weretoo many for us. And we fell to speculating upon exactly what wouldhappen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporiaif the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's placeat table was where he got the full voltage of the eyes every timethe Princess switched them on. And whenever he reached for thewater and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behindhis ordinary resisting power. And he drank enough to float a ship!As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonelyhours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes andwe concluded that they were Latin--Latin chiefly engaged in thebusiness of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wivesand mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years andhad been engaged for a generation in the business of taming theirhusbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast, and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good oftheir towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So thesefemale eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decidedto investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid offfrom our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Ourcloser view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probablywas forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met herwhen she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashingher eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us forever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have beenthe hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deckwith the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes. Hewas talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair ofthe new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf scoreon the Emporia Country Club links--anyway something of broad, universal human interest. But those things seemed to pall on her. So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women athome--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day andthe minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These thingsleft her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered, slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along onher toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slimlithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she wasat target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. Shemanaged to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoanthe cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansaspartner suggested that life would be broader and better for womenafter the war, because they would have so much more important apart to do than before in the useful work of the world. "Ah, yes, "she said, "perhaps so. But with the men all gone what shall we dowhen we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllablesof petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you knowwomen were made to be pet-ted. " There was a bewildered second underthe machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion consideredseriously her theory. He had never cherished such a theory before. But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of thepleasant new things in it--this theory of the woman requiring tobe pet-ted!

Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said: "Oh, yes--comeon, Col-o-nel"--making three unaccented syllables of the word--"andwe shall have une femme sandweech. " She gave the Colonel her arm. The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy withthe Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia CountryClub, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyesto the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyousincandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchmanbut gazing sweetly at the American, "Col-o-nel, will you pleasecarry my books?" They must have weighed six or eight ounces! Andshe shifted them to the Col-o-nel as though they weighed a ton!

So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking room to find his mate. They two then and there discussed the woman proposition in detailand drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporiatype, the American type that carries its own books and burdens anddoes not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry anddoes not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may diefor the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing thatthey should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others. But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henryand me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched theArmenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerageand all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through thedrill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French armyand avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling, they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It wasqueer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. Itwas written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and brokentime; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had thecharm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as thestrange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang. 

"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy inkhaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano. "That, " nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that'sthe 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax and he went awaywhistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with theiridea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music, the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twinsfrom Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in theirstriking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying acrossthe world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in itsessence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, eachcult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind. And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to loveone's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kindof humour, one's own kind of philosophy; knowing that they are notperfect and understanding their limitations; trusting to time andcircumstance to bring out the fast colours of life in the eternalwash. Thinking thoughts like these that night, Henry's bunk-matecould not sleep. So he slipped on a grey overcoat over his pajamasand put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, and went out ondeck into the hot night that falls in the gulf stream in summer. It was the murky hour before dawn and around and around the deck hepaced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt spectre in the night. The deck chairs were filled with sleepers from the berths belowdecks. At last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped to gazeover the rail at the water and the stars when he heard this froma deck chair behind him, "Wake up, Net--for God's sake wake up!"whispered a frightened woman's voice. "There's that awful thingagain that scared me so awhile ago!"

[Illustration with caption: "Col-o-nel, will you please carry mybooks?"]

Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean interested us. Anocean always seems so unreasonable to inlanders. And that morningwhen there was "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawnbreaking, " Henry came alongside and looked at the seascape, alltwisting and writhing and tossing and billowing, up and down andsideways. He also looked at his partner who was gradually growingpale and wan and weary. And Henry heard this: "She's on a bender;she's riz about ten feet during the night. I guess there's beenrain somewhere up near the headwaters or else the fellow took hisfinger out of the hole in the dyke. Anyway, she'll be out of herbanks before breakfast. I don't want any breakfast; I'm going tobed for the day. " And he went. 

During the day Henry brought the cheerful information that the Doctorwas down and that the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearingout the deck. Henry also added that her slapping was scheduled forthat night. 

"Has her hair slopped over yet?" This from me. 

"No, " answered Henry, "but it's getting crinklier and crinklierand she looks pinker and pinker, and prettier and prettier, andyou ought to see her in her new purple sweater. She sprang that onthe boat this afternoon! It's laying 'em out in swaths!" Henry'saffinity was afraid to turn off his back. But he turned a paleface toward his side-kick and whispered: "Henry, you tell her, "he gulped before going on, "that if she can't find anyone else toslap, there's a man down here who can't fight back!"

A sense of security comes to one who churns along seven days ona calm sea on an eventless voyage. And the French, by easy-goingways, stimulate that sense of security; we had heard weird storiesof boat-drills at daybreak, of midnight alarms and of passengerssleeping on deck in their life preservers, and we were preparedfor the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have. Theynever came. One afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had noticeat noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon. The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and atthree o'clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assignedto him, donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffedappearance, answered to a roll-call, guyed those about him afterthe manner of old friends, and waited for something else. It nevercame. The ship's officers gradually faded from the decks and thepassengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappearedone by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with theirlife-belts moulted! That was the last we heard of the boat-drillor the life-belts. The French are just that casual. 

But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grislyincident that brought us close up to the war. We were gathered inthe dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south--a merespeck on the horizon's edge. Signals began to twinkle from her andwe felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at fullspeed. The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, butwe sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for, though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have beena U-boat lure. Often the Germans have used the lure of distresssignals on a sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the U-boathas sent to death the Good Samaritan of the sea! It is awful. Butthe German has put mercy off the sea!

Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for hismoral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry brokeout with this: "I've been thinking about this U-boat business;how it would be if we had the German's job. I have been trying tothink if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run aU-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I've been trying toimagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or downat the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captainof a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinkingship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to figureout how the fellows sitting around him would take it. They'd getup and leave. He would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag orbluff or blare of victory would gloss over his act. We simply don'tthink the German way. We have a loyalty to humanity deeper thanour patriotism. There are certain things self-respecting men can'tdo and live in Wichita. But there seem to be no restrictions inGermany. The U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lureprobably holds about such a place in his home town as Charley Carey, our banker, or Walter Innes, our dry goods man. He is doubtlessa leading citizen of some German town; doubtless a kind father, agood husband and maybe a pillar of the church. And I suppose townand home and church will applaud him when he goes back to Germanyto brag about his treachery. In Wichita, town and home and churchwould be ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if they came backto brag about killing men who were lured to death by responding tothe call of distress. "

And so, having disposed of the psychology of the enemy, we turnedin for the night. We were entering the danger zone and the night washot. A few passengers slept on deck; but most of the ship's companywent to their cabins. We didn't seem to be afraid. We presumedthat our convoy would appear in the morning. But when it failedto appear we assumed that there was no danger. No large Frenchpassenger boat had been sunk by the Germans; this fact we heard adozen times that day. It soothed us. The day passed without bringingour convoy. Again we went to bed, realizing rather clearly thatthe French do take things casually; and believing firmly that theconvoys would come with the dawn. But dawn came and brought noconvoy. We seemed to be nearing land. The horizon was rarely withouta boat. The day grew bright. We were almost through the danger zone. We went to lunch a gay lot, all of us; but we hurried back to thedeck; not uneasily, not in fear, understand, but just to be ondeck, looking landward. And then at two o'clock it appeared. Faroff in the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. It lookedlike a seabird; but it grew. In ten minutes the whole deck wasexcited. Every glass was focused on the growing black spot. Andthen it loomed up the size of a baseball; it showed colour, a dullyellow in the distance and then it swelled and took form and glowedbrighter and came rushing toward us, as large as a moon, as largeas a barrel, and then we saw its outlines, and it came swoopingover us, a great beautiful golden thing and the whole deck burstinto cheers. It was our convoy, a dirigible balloon--vivid goldenyellow, trimmed with blue! How fair it seemed. How graceful and howsurely and how powerfully it circled about the ship like a greathovering bird, and how safe we felt; and as we cheered and cheeredthe swirling, glowing, beautiful thing, we knew how badly frightenedwe really had been. With danger gone, the tension lifted and weread the fear in our hearts. A torpedo boat destroyer came lumberingacross the sky line. It also was to convoy us, but it had a mostundramatic entrance; and besides we had sighted land. The deck cheeredeasily, so we cheered the land. And everyone ran about exclaimingto everyone else about the wonder and splendour of the balloon, and everyone took pictures of everyone else and promised to sendprints, and the land waxed fat and loomed large and hospitablewhile Henry paced the deck with his hands clasped reflectivelybehind him. He was deeply moved and language didn't satisfy himmuch. Finally he took his fellow Kansan by the arm and pointed tothe magnificence of the hovering spectre in yellow and blue thatcircled about the ship:

"Bill, " he said, solemnly, "isn't she a peach!" He paused, thenfrom his heart he burst out: "'How beautiful upon the mountain arethe feet of them that bring glad tidings!' I wish the fellows inWichita could get this thing for the wheat show!"

And thus we came to the shores of sunny France, a land that was toremind us over and over again of our own sunny land of Kansas. 

We landed after dark. Every one was going about vowing deathlessfriendship to every one else, and so far as the stenographers andthe ambulance boys were concerned, it came to Henry and me that wemeant it; for they were a fine lot, just joyous, honest, brave youngAmericans going out to do their little part in a big enterprise. While we were bidding good-bye to our boys and girls, we kepta weather eye on the Eager Soul. She had hooked the Gilded Youthfairly deeply. He saw that her trunk came up from the hold, but wenoticed that while he was gone, the Doctor showed up and went withher to sort out her hand-baggage from the pile on the deck. Thegang plank was let down under a pair of smoky torches. And theGilded Youth had paid a fine tip some place to be permitted to bethe first passenger off the boat that he might get one of the twotaxis in sight for the Eager Soul. She followed him, but she madehim let the Doctor come along. And so the drinks--lemon squash andbuttermilk--were equally on Henry and me. We hurried down the gangplank after the happy trio. They were young--so infinitely andineffably young, it seemed to us. And the girl's face was flushedand joyous, and her hair--why it didn't shake out and drown her wenever knew; certainly it surged out from under her hat like ripplesof youth incarnate. We saw them stacking their valises in the taxiand over the taxi and around the taxi and the last we saw of herwas when she bent out of the cab window and waved and smiled at us, two sedate old parties alone there in the crowd, with the Frenchlanguage rising to our ears as we teetered unsteadily into it. 

What an adventure they were going into--what a new adventure, thenew and beautiful adventure of youth, the old and inexplicableadventure of life! So we waved back at them so long as they werein sight, and the white handkerchief of the Eager Soul flutteredback from the disappearing cab. When it was gone, Henry turned toa sad-looking cabman with a sway-backed carriage and explained withmuch eloquence that we wanted him to haul us a la hotel France--tootsweet!

[Illustration with caption: So we waved back at them so long asthey were in sight]

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"

Bordeaux is the "Somewhere in France" from which cablegrams frompassengers on the French liners usually are sent. This will be nonews to the Germans, nor to Americans who read the advertisementsof the French liners, but it may be news to Americans who receivethe mysterious cablegrams "from a French port, " after their friendshave landed. It is a dear old town, mouldy, and weather-beaten, and mediaeval, this Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along thestreet's over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneakingmischievously out of bounds. A woe-begone trolley creaks through thenarrow streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over the mistakesof misspent lives, larrup disconsolate horses over stony streetsas they creak and jog and wheeze ahead of the invisible crowsthat seem always to be hovering above ready to batten upon theirrightful provender. For an hour in the morning before our train leftfor Paris we chartered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town andtook in Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita, or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as thatgoes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide andbeautiful world. "All this needs, " said Henry, as he lolled backupon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rimson the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth, "all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a goodfilm!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the groupof firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chessor something. But the town had an historic interest for us as thehome of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked uptheir monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderateidealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; wethought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage wecould to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary bandwagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew;indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our ownpolitics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before whatseemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncoveredheads for a second before we took the train for Paris. 

All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of Francewe were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat andsmiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris, and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thingwhich we missed most from the landscape, being used to the Americanlandscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day'sjourney. In Kansas alone there are 190, 000 continually pervadingthe landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no privateautomobiles in France, that the government had commandeered allautomobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallonsof gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at thetwo-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbonsof roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills, and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateauxthat flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was amillion miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming upfrom Bordeaux. 

But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk agreat flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us andsailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to playwith us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with ourshipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windowsto look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that flutteredabove us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with hercrinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enoughfrom the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and forto see, " the airplanes. 

But the airplanes gave us the day's first opportunity to talk tothe Eager Soul. Until dusk the Gilded Youth had kept her in hisdonjon--a first class compartment jammed with hand-baggage, andwhere she had insisted that the Young Doctor should come also. Weknew that without being told; also it was evident as we passed upand down the car aisle during the day that she was acting as a sortof human Baedeker to the Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, towhom chateaux and French countryside were an old, old story, satby and hooted. But the airplanes pulled him out of his donjon keepand the Young Doctor with him. He wasn't above showing the YoungDoctor how much a Gilded Youth really knows about mechanics andairplanes, and we slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul. Wehad a human interest in the contest between the Gilded Youth andthe Young Doctor, and a sporting interest which centered in thedaily score. And we gathered this: That it was the Young Doctor'sday. For he was in France to help the greatest cause in the world;and the Gilded Youth affected to be in France--to enjoy the greatestoutdoor game in the world. But he had made it plain that day tothe Eager Soul that working eighteen hours a day under shell fire, driving an ambulance, was growing tame. He was going back, of course, but he was thinking seriously of the air service. The Doctor wantedno thrills. He was willing to boil surgical instruments or squirtdisinfectant around kitchens to serve. And the Eager Soul likedthat attitude, though it was obvious to us, that she was in thewar game as a bit of a sport and because it was too dull in herOld Home Town, "somewhere in the United States. " And we knew alsowhat she did not admit, even if she recognized it, that in theOld Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of her spirit andintelligence were scarce--and she was out looking for her own SirGalahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the HolyGrail. The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoythe new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathefree air as an achieving human creature--but, alas! one's fortiesare too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eageras her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world idealsinto which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden awaydeeply in the secret places of her heart, were a man and a homeand children. 

We whizzed through the dusk in the suburbs of Paris that night, seeing the gathering implements of war coming into the landscapefor the first time--the army trucks, the horizon blue of the Frenchuniform, the great training camps, the Red Cross store houses, the scores and scores of hospitals that might be seen in the publicbuildings with Red Cross flags on them, the munition plants pouringout their streams of women workers in their jumpers and overalls. 

The girl porters came through and turned on the lights in thetrain. No lights outside told us that we were hurrying through agreat city. Paris was dark. We went through the underground wherethere was more light than there was above ground. The streets seemedlike tunnels and the tunnels like streets. We came into the dingystation and a score of women porters and red capped girls came forour baggage. They ran the trucks, they moved the express; theytook care of the mail, and through them we edged up the stairwayinto the half-lighted station and looked out into the night--black, lampless, engulfing--and it was Paris!

It was nine o'clock as we stood on the threshold of the stationpeering into the murk. Not a taxi was in the stand waiting; butfrom afar we could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that soundedlike the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city. Theair was vibrant with these wild calls. We were an hour waiting therein the gloom for a conveyance. But when we left the wide squareabout the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understoodwhy the auto horns were bellowing so. For the automobiles wererunning lickety-split through the darkness without lights andthe howls of their horns pierced the night. The few street lightsburning a low candle power at the intersections of the greatboulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements. And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and theRue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings ofthe Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to markour way. Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait, and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of thedarkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast ofanother and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorusas we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street. The din was nerve racking--but highly Parisian. One fancied thatParis, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation bymultiplying its sound!

We went to the Ritz--now smile; the others did! Not that the Ritzis an inferior hotel. We went there because it was really thegrandee among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in Paris whenwe told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled. The human minddoesn't seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritzwithout the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawedand catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporiaare written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which isthe rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background forour rusticity--the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay inus! We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as aleading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminalfacilities. And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting foran international figure. There, it seemed to me, the rich and thegreat would congregate to invite him to dinners, and to me, atleast, who had imagination, there seemed something rather splendidin fancying the gentry saying, "Ah, yes--Henry J. Allen, ofWichita--the next governor of Kansas, I understand!" Henry indicatedhis feeling about the Ritz thus: The night we arrived he failed, for the first time in two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal inour $17. 93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York. The gold braideduniforms that we saw in the corridors of the Ritz that night madeus pause and consider many things. When we unpacked our valises, there were the little bundles just as they had come from 43rdStreet. Henry tucked his away with a sigh, and just before he wentto sleep he called across the widening spaces between sleep andwakening: "I suppose we might have bought that $23. 78 outfit, easyenough!"

It was in the morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wearoff for Henry. He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they wereconserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels ofParis excepting Friday and Saturday nights. The English, who arenaturally mean, declare that the French save seventy-five per centof the use of their hot water by putting the two hot water nightstogether, as no living Frenchman ever took a bath two consecutivedays. But it did not seem that way to Henry and me. And anyway weheard these theories later. But that morning Henry, who doesn'treally mind a cold bath, was ready for it when he happened to lookaround the bathroom and found there wasn't a scrap of soap. Therehe was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better--if oneshould include the dripping from his first plunge--one might sayhe was au jus! And what is more, he was au mad. He jabbed the bellbutton that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry hadhis speech ready for him. "Donnez moi some soap here and be mightyblame toot sweet about it!" The valet explained that soap wasnot furnished with the room. It took some time to get that acrossin broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly andin his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo, cried: "Say! We are paying, " at the dazed look in the valet'sface Henry repeated slower and louder, "We are paying, I say, fifteen-dollars--fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms. You goask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?" And he wavedthe valet grandly out. 

[Illustration with caption: "Donnez moi some soap here and be mightyblame toot sweet about it!"]

An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in war time. Our waylay through the lonely Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione, down the Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beautiful Placede la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was. Nowand then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances, or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of theplace. But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marbleand cement only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of theFrench provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and savefor the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heapedupon the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place might have beenan excavation rather than the heart of a great world metropolis. Before the war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go into theChamps Elysees was an adventure of a life time. One took one'schances. One survived, but he had his thrills. But that morning wemight have walked safely with bowed head and hands clasped behindus through the Place, across the Elysian fields; there we sat fora moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw nothing more shockingthan the beautiful women of France gathering in the abandonedcafes and music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the Frenchwounded. 

In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, wecame to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place dela Concorde. The five floors of a building once used for a man's clubare now filled with bustling, hustling Americans. Those delicatelytinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find itin the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lowerBroadway, not the place of the bright lights. The click and clatterof typewriters punctuate the air. Natty stenographers, prim officewomen, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants fromperhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department, the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly throughthe corridors. In the reception rooms are men from the ends of theearth--Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians, Japs--every nation at peace with America has some business sometimein that Paris office of the American Red Cross. For there abidesthe commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time hewas a spare, well made man in his late thirties, --Major Grayson M. P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago afterservice in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddlinginsurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largesttrust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed, but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He wasso quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own greatheart to keep it from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp inhis speech which might fool strangers who do not know about thesteel of his nerves and the keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomyoffice with a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made quick, sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant voice that never backedtrack nor weakened before a disagreeable situation. He is the manwho more than anyone else has laid out the spending of the majorpart of the first one hundred millions gathered in America by theRed Cross drive last summer. He held his rank as Major in the UnitedStates army, and wore his uniform as though it were his skin, clean, unwrinkled and handsome, with that gorgeous quality of unconsciouspride that is, after all, the West Pointer's real grace. 

As we sat in that noble room, looking out across the Place dela Concorde, past the Obelisk to the House of Deputies beyond theSeine, it was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The spectacleof Major Murphy's young men in their habiliments of service, RedCross military uniforms that made them look like lilies of thevalley and bright and morning stars, gave us both something tothink about. The recollection of those $17. 93 uniforms of ours inthe rooms at the Ritz was disquieting. We had service hats; theseyoung gods wore brown caps with leather visors and enameled RedCrosses above the leather. We had cotton khaki tunics unadorned, and of a vintage ten years old. They had khaki worsted of a cutto conform to the newest general order. They had Sam Browne beltsof high potency, and we had no substitute even for that insigniaof power. They had shiny leather puttees. We had tapes. They hadbrown shoes--we had not given a fleeting thought to shoes. We mightas well have had congress gaiters! So when the conversation withMajor Murphy turned to a point where he said that he expected us togo with him to the French front immediately he took a look at ourSunday best Emporia and Wichita civilian clothes and asked casually, "Have you gentlemen uniforms?" For me right there the cock crowedthree times. Henry heard it also, and answered slowly, "Well, no--not exactly. "

"Mr. Hoppen, " said the Major, "take these gentlemen down the streetand show them where to get uniforms!" Which Mr. Hoppen went anddid. Now Mr. Hoppen is related to the Morgans--the J. PierpontMorgans--and he has small notion of Emporia and Wichita. So he tookus to a tailorshop after his own heart. We chose a modest outfit, with no frills. We ordered one pair of riding breeches each, andone tunic each, and one American army cap each. The tunic was toconform to the recent Army regulation for Red Cross tunics, and thetrousers were to match; Henry looked at me and received a distresssignal, but he ignored it and said nonchalantly, "When can we havethem?" The tailor told us to call for a fitting in two weeks, butwe were going to the front before that. That made no difference;and then Henry came to the real point. "How much, " he asked, "willthese be?" The tailor answered in francs and we quickly divided thesum into dollars. It made $100. "For both?" asked Henry hopefully. "For each, " answered the tailor firmly. There stood Mr. Hoppen, ofMorgans. There also stood Wichita and Emporia. Henry's eyes did notbat; Mr. Hoppen wore a shimmering Sam Browne belt. Looking casuallyat it Henry asked:

"Shall we require one of those?"

"Gentlemen are all wearing them, sir, " answered the tailor. 

"How much?" queried Henry. 

"Well, you gentlemen are a trifle thick, sir, and we'll have tohave them specially made, but I presume we may safely say $14 each, sir!"

Henry did not even look at me, but lifted the wormwood to his lipsand quaffed it. "Make two, " he answered. 

The world should not be unsafe for democracy if Wichita and Emporiacould help it!

We went to a show that night with the feeling of guilt and shameone has who has betrayed his family. That $114 with ten more tocome for brown shoes, flickered in the spot light and babbled onthe lips of the singers. They danced it in the ballet. Each of uswas thinking with guilty horror of how he would break the news ofthat uniform bargain to his wife. So we went home tired that firstnight, through the grim dark streets of Paris and to our rooms. And there were those 43rd street uniforms still unwrapped in thebureau drawer. Henry again demanded a dress rehearsal. He insistedthat as we were going to have to wear them to the front we ought toknow how we looked inside of them. But we were weary and again putoff the dread hour. The next morning we bought our ten dollar brownshoes, and concluded that there was a vast amount of foolishnessconnected with this war. 

During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to takeus to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and splutteringthrough the French language. Henry never was sure of anythingbut toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever stickingsophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen. TheGerman never actually broke out. If it had, we should have been shotas spies. But it was so close that it always seemed to be snoopingaround ready to jump out. That made it hard for me to shine inFrench. 

These adventures with the French language were not exactly themartial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and WarrenFinney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, whenthey trundled us out to win the war. Yet these adventures wereserious. They were adventures in lonesomeness. We could imaginehow the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say whenthis language began to wash about his ears and submerge him inits depths. We could fancy American soldiers wandering throughthe French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn'tunderstand the prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak, isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation offoreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of theeverlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesicknessthat hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a strange land!"

So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to dine with us, and welet her order a dinner so complicated that it tasted like a lexicon!We learned much about the Eager Soul that night. She told us ofher two college degrees, her year's teaching experience, her fouryears' nursing, and her people in the old home town. Bit by bit, we picked out her status from the things she dropped inadvertently. And that night in our rooms we assembled the parts of the puzzlethus; one rambling Bedford limestone American castle in the CountryClub district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, alamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some ofit was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love forHenry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen, Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, andBernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a recordas organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state threeyears ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by the dozen and candyin five pound boxes! We could not prove it, but we agreed that sheprobably bossed her mother and that the brothers' wives hated herand the sister's husband loved her to death! She was one of thosesocially assured persons in the Old Home Town who are never afraidof themselves out of it! She confessed that she had seen moreor less of the Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in apyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted that she had gone tothe station to bid the Young Doctor good-bye. She had been assignedto a hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going out the followingday. When we left her at the door of the Hotel Vouillemont, weplunged back into the encircling gloom of the French language withreal regret. 

As we went further into the life about us, we felt that all the menwere in uniform and all the women in mourning. The French mournbeautifully. France today is the world's tragedy queen whosesuffering is all genuine, but all magnificently done. In the shopwindows of the Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera areno bright colours--excepting for men's uniforms. In the windowsof the millinery shops, purple is the gayest colour--purple andlavender and black prevail. On every street are blind windows ofdeparted shops. Some bear signs notifying customers that they areclosed for the duration of the war; others simply stare blanklyand piteously at passersby who know the story without words. 

Yet if it is not a gay Paris, it is anything but a sad Paris. Ratherit is a busy Paris; a Paris that stays indoors and works. For anhour or two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday also theythrong the boulevards. And the theatres are always well filled;and there the bright dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombregowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies and foyers are not farfrom brilliant. Bands and orchestras play in the theatres, but themusic lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, artisticallyexecuted, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of menpast the military age. We heard "La Tosca" one afternoon and inthe orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and the tenor was fat!As the season grew old, we heard "Louise, " "Carmen, " "Aphrodite, ""Butterfly" (in London), and "Aida" (in Milan), and always themusical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies whoare no better than they should be, was music from old heads andold hearts. The "other lips and other hearts whose tales of love"should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet aretoying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the danceof death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europetoday. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the musicthat should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reedsand strings and brass is an echo, an echo altogether lovely butpassionless!

Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritzat midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had beennotified that we were to start for the front the next morning. Wetold him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessedto him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. Hehad been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Crosscommissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seenthe worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reachedour rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading, but in command. For we were to start at seven the next morning, and it was orders. So each went to his bedroom and began unwrappinghis bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolatedivinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The shirtwent on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someonehad shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-casewouldn't get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspectionproved that they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good as a waistline! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eightinches short in one waistband is a catastrophe. Yet there we were. It was half past twelve. In six hours more we must be on our wayto the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative. And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for thevalet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rangfor the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left onthe call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang forthe chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we wereof French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began makinggestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestureswere the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republicanparty at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gesturesand impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took therecalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against hisfriend's heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the idealthey came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen shirt, and inthe tail of it marked out dramatically a "V" slice about the shapeof an old-fashioned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozeninches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointedfrom the shirt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of hisfriend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was togo into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to seeintelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures ofthat Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew thetruth, and it made her free, so she cried, "Wee wee!" And oratoryhad again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o'clockshe returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brownshirt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist lineof the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for wefound that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulleddown, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possibleto conceal the facts of one's double life. So we went forth withMajor Murphy the next morning as care-free as "Eden's garden birds. "We looked like birds, too--scarecrows!

[Illustration: Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe]

Our business took us to the American Ambulance men who were with theFrench army. Generally when they were at work they were quarterednear a big base hospital; and their work took them from the largehospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches. Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area ofFrance. As the chief activity of the French at the time of ourvisit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first weekat the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walkedthrough the ruined city. The Germans had just finished theirevening strafe; two hundred big shells had been thrown over fromtheir field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth shellhad dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the nextday. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spendjust so many shells on each enemy point, and no more. The Germanwork of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intactupon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives inthe town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagonroad that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way, is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this roadthey think the revitalment trains pass up to the front. But thesentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in theplace were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city beforethe war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some oldand interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, abishop's residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled andshattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm anddignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellousthat mere stone could translate so delicately the highest gropingof men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And thebroken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness oftheir ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spillingit footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all aboutthese ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shopsand stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appallingwreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed andrisen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuriesto the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindlygroping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a littleround-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on atable, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debrisand left to petrify as the shell wrecked it--a thousand littledetails of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this wasthe Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finishedtheir evening strafe. 

From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruinedvillages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark beforemoonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyouslyflirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed ina tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinnerworth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots, some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omeletsoused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese andcoffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on fiveminutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance menwere under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchmanof a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully, played host graciously and told us many interesting things aboutthe work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withalso sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long afterwe had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting Frenchlieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. Butthis one was different. He was so gentle and so serious withoutbeing at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, andsaid quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his timewas long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem tobother him. He passed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But hisserious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room ofhis office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk, "Defense absolutement de rire!" "It's absolutely forbidden tolaugh. " Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dinedin the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songswith trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth. 

So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, andwith it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist thathid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant roomin a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlighta great brick structure running around a compound. The compound wasover 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a bigRed Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashedstones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound aRed Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Genevalights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitalsand protect them from air raids. 

At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men whowere stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line. It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going withoutlights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun. The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled andskidded along and we passed scores of other vehicles going up andcoming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The RedCross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything butammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalmenttime. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions, food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an armygoing, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When wereached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had beenclimbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were ata first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one couldsee the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yardsinto the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In thedugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandagedbefore starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital, and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standinginside out of the misty rain. 

As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of thebig guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon. But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and aroar which told us that German shells were coming in near us. Aswe stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us, over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting upthe clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over thewhite muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door ofthe dugout passed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalmenttrain. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mistcame a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then, creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again. Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the Germanshells crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. Butthe silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, passingus, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In theghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to bespectral--like a line of passing souls. A doctor came out of thedugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist. Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans werelanding bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more thana quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that theGermans were shelling a cross-road. They shelled it every night atmidnight to smash the revitalment train. The shells were landingright in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts werepassing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in anambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or fivewounded. A shell had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men. But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never evenhesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up theroad. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind themist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, clearedthe way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in theghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two morewounded. 

After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road wastaking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the littlecemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us. And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mistup the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dimhorizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais. " Itfitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistlingtogether. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one anotherwhistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship--theGilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was notshimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field serviceman, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talkedmusic--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midstof death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight toforget death for something more real than death. And so it cameabout that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:

And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their specialgift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of Germankultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is thedivine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case fordemocracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crisesthe rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to deathfor something that defies death, something immortal in the humanheart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those commonsoldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances arebrothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracyis the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinshipof men. 

So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth wasfine gold. He was called for a wounded man. As he cranked up hiscar he asked rather too casually, "Have you seen our friend fromthe boat--the pretty nurse?" We started to answer; the stretcherbearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and wereturned to the hospital. 

We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousandmen had passed through that hospital--some upon the long journey, so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and methere seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds. 

In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out thedead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly asthey could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers andorderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a headtoward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed, "a dearth of woman's nursing and a lack of woman's tears. " No oneknew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag abouthim. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he wasan officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outsidethe fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely, heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we hadbeen among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had sleptuneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give onepoor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followedthe stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to histomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard everhad seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned andgaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows. 

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern inSt. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his Englishon us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Haveyou heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Thenhe told us that the night before the German airmen had come to thehospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiarybombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives. They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraftguns near by--the allies until those August and September Germanraids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they cameagain swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctorsand the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out ofthe burning building. Then toward morning they came and droppedhandbills which declared, "If you don't want your hospitals bombed, move them back further from the front!"

The Germans were not acting in the heat of passion. They were fightingscientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital ismoved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrenein the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a greatmajority of our wounded to return to battle. 

Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed thatnight at Vlaincourt. "And the French officer de liason between theFrench army and the American ambulance, what of him?" we asked. 

"He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb, " answered theFrenchman. 

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "Itis absolutely forbidden to laugh" in war!

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR

There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said forwar as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares thatit refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills menand nations and races; it is stagnation. But war shakes up society, puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions, new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of war that came toHenry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitalsand first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there wasa tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives thatreally get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinchingourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strangeland, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively tothe science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting inour offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers, wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom ourmiserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year wasa trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spreadbefore Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum ortalking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation withthe local statesmen. At five o'clock Henry should be on his way tothe Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roarof the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me thatwe were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in thesunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoidsugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of myfigure. 

But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, throughunderbrush, across shell holes to a hidden trench choked withtelephone cables that should lead underground to an observationpost where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlookingthe battle of the Champagne. As we puffed and huffed up the hill, we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but afew weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought usthe news of the Champagne drive for hill 208. Among other thingsthe report had declared "a number of French soldiers were orderedinto their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to gointo action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through apeep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half wayup the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneadedand pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hillsperhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widenedor narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under shell fireglimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds. It was hard torealize that three years before the valley before us had been oneof the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little greytowns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be"that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" Thereit all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk, " with its head choppedoff; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hopeof greenness. " "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair inleprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath lookedkneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Rolandcrossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines--two whitegashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratchedbetween them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wireentanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a fewhundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart. At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with thegashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused torest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communicationtrench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench werebrought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, hadbeen converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcherbearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the littleshrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated thescene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distantboom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among thetrenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his deathagony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our partyclimbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glassestoward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grewalive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running aboutexcitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Armymajor in a regular United States army uniform so grand that comparedwith our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollaroutfit. The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant, who had no right to boss a Major! But something had to be done. So the second lieutenant did it. He called down the Major; showedhim that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made itclear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouettedagainst the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of Germanhardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trencheswere two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous. Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up thehill. 

[Illustration: One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugoutand began turning his glasses toward the German lines]

The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when wefinally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagnebattle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands, and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of Englishtanks abandoned by the French. Lying out there in No Man's Landbetween the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like wornout threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything elsein the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagnedrive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just howfar the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France lastspring, before America declared war. To begin: The French moralewent bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. TheFrench commission told us how sorely France needed the Americanwar declaration. But to say that the morale of a nation has gonebad means so much. It is always a struggle even in peace, evenin prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nationto keep any Nation honest. But when hope begins to sag, when theforces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant inevery nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil timesto rise--they rise. Leadership fails in its battle against them. For a year after the morale of the French began to come back strong, the French newspapers and French government were busy exposing andpunishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917. German money has been traced to persons high in authority. A networkof German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of menhigh in government--the kaiser is not above using the thief and theharlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured intocertain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragicdisaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intriguein Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the resultof three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partlythe weakening under the strain of all these things, of this "tootoo solid flesh and blood. " During the winter of 1916-17 soldiersat the front received letters from home telling of starvation andfreezing and sickness in their families. And trench conditions inthe long hard winter were all but unbearable. When a soldier finallygot a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroadsystem breaking down and he had long waits at junction points withno sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter. French soldiers goinghome on leave would lie all night and all day out in the open, drenched by the rain and stained by the mud, and would reach homebringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trenchmisery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to thehome while the soldier was away. Then when he went back to fight, he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers withoutsupplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quantities to supplythe battle needs. In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his headin the army and ordered the men into their own barrage. Hundredswere slaughtered. Thousands were verging on mutiny. A regimentrefused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. The Americanambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did waswhen they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the departmentheads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, andthe withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achievedall but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth. 

And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changedthe face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagneat what might have been the wreck of France. 

All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American RedCross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths anddisinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homewardbound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name ofevery French soldier's family that is in need, and that family'sneeds are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the surehope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery ofthe forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation's politicalconsciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser's friends, the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter. 

We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotchedacres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenchesand scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles, and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the pictureof his soul's agony upon his daily work. 

It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line. We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses hadbeen killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, andthe big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the Germanairmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Graduallyas we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter andfainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into awide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. Itwas bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun musthave been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here andthere, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick totheir homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickleof commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral andfound its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, thepale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and ironcan be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feetsquare has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and thehole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no onein this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about, gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place castupon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course, is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls areintact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spiresand gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, andthe windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of thechurch gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glassas art treasures. 

That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys whosaid the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheimsmade from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bittersbottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had boughta job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in apiece!

We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the backof the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalkwith a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke toHenry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to thestone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a holein the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must haveweighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made itclear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in buta few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock upon post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talkFrench, learned that another shell would be due in three or fourminutes, we left town. 

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hiddenonly, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven intomats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns fivemiles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside theroad indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our drivertramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hourand we skedaddled. 

From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne, a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharplyfrom the German lines and soon passes out of the German range andthe shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shellholes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valleyas we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rowsand rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in theearth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and theygave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed withcolour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted thecheckered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Talldark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed throughthe quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in ourfaces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold ontheir uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flagsof staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations ofcolours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--eventhe door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after theGerman bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan, from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which theGermans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, runningpell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers. 

As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division afterdivision of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, werealized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Everyfew weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers comein. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the frontor dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and faraway, " 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 lashthe home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotionscomes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the humanheart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a dayor 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 lastthree years and a half have passed and re-passed, through thosefifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers arequartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million menhave lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiringwomen that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrousand gentle and as kind. 

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowdedwith soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly livinghappily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henryburst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichitaor Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty finesoldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters werethere alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flittingabout here were just little children three years ago when theirdaddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered bythe hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do butrest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East inGoshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awfulthing--what a hell in the earth, war is!"

And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as theywere meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin andwaste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sittingtogether some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias bloomingin the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line. And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat--that preciousload of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagnewhere we were the oldest people in the ship's company. And we begantalking 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, sothat even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in thestorm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, howmuch--how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such asweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise--yether heart was a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, hiskeen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quickin him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill inthe misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross outof him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of thisawful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, andthey were so young and so untried!

The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in ourcar were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we wereinside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at theroad menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside thethirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last springthat the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germansdemanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keepthem thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies hadbeen observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until theyfound that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left theGerman prisoners and came to French road menders--generally FrenchChinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other orientalpeoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns. These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a fewyards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal. A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got bumpy and atgiven distances along the road were repair stations for the governmentautomobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war. Atnight along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the linewe travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurriedthrough the night, passed village after village swarming with soldiers, black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritatethe French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding intopicture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on thesidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks. Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and darkand we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due coursewe came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur ofthe railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we founda field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is tobe renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thingthat happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in thehospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out ahospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw onehospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundredcases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that wehad heard booming away for three days as we went up and down theline had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through thehospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure, some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-foursnakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, andhospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Ofcourse, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless. The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turningmen back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up tothe normal average of the war; but they are not so finical aboutflies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or theAmericans. They probably feel that there are more essential thingsto consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospitalwe saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteenyears old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. Wesaw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academictype, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubbylooking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust andthe scum of the earth. "

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

But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the nextday we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is alittle bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered, and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night andgo forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. Therailway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there abig naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death intothe 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 thatday the road was black with trucks going up to the front line withsupplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods afew miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled outof our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't justgrow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, theshattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings!Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed townsfor days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet thebombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobilesat Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki ridingbreeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preservethat pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistbandfrom 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me thatwe should first meet a German shell face to face in a place likeRecicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcelyshaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gatheredto greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!--an awful sound! It was asif someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store--atEmporia--tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods, and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landedit upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seatssix thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realizedthat he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothingto the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let itpass also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier. So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American AmbulanceService. In a minute there was a fearful whistle--long, piercing, and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock inEmporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time wesaw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away--overby the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentionedthe 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 tostart his car. 

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

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

"Hurt badly?" asked another boy. 

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

The details interested us; we could see that the secret was beinguncovered. Again came an awful roar and another terrific bang--thistime the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before--perhaps 300 feetaway. 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 neededcorrection. To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get asmuch as possible of your body under the eaves of your steel helmet. Somewhere between the second and third bang, they got a helmet onme. No one knows where it came from, nor how it got there. Butthere it was, while they were correcting Henry's duck. In spite ofthem, when he ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multiplyinghis exposure by ten. But it really does a fat man little good toduck anyway; the eaves of his helmet hardly cover his collar. Itwas while they were trying to telescope Henry that some one grabbedme by the arm and said: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!" Abri wasa brand new word to me, but it seemed to be some place to go andthat 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 adugout covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand bags, and wewent in there and found it full of French officers. They have somesense. The abri would not turn a direct explosion of a shell; butit would shield one against a glancing blow and against the shrapnelwhich sprays itself out from the point where the shell hits likea molten iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come over we leftthe abri. The Germans had been allowancing Recicourt to nine aday. But that day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. Theycame very close and fairly fast together. As they came Henry wassitting in the barn where the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunchwas on the table and Henry was writing. The shells sounded justoutside the barn. "What are you writing, Mr. Allen?" asked MajorMurphy. "I'm sketching, " stuttered the Wichita statesman, "a sortof a draft of the American terms of peace!"

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

[Illustration: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!"]

We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piledinto an ambulance, were buttoned in from the back by the driver, and went sailing up the hill and into the woods. They told us thatwe were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess. We rememberedthat but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices, that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and bloodyfighting. And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannonroaring all about us. We were told that four thousand cannon wereplanted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of themwere active that day. Yet we could see none, so completely were theyhidden by camouflage. The woods were barren of leaves or branchesthough they should have been in foliage. We gazed through the windowsof the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and thenrather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefullycorded 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 beenunder the ax instead of under fire. They were French seventy-fiveshells--deadly brass cartridges two feet long, all nicely andpeacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees! We rodethrough them for several miles. Beside the road always were thelittle heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always theengineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made bythe incoming shells. And occasionally they were coming in; thoughthey seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest. Theear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between whatare known as arrives and departs. The departs were going out thatday at the ratio of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wastedenough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize!Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minuteor so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping of our ownbroad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer. For some way the sound of the shells of our own guns shriekingover us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation ofa great faith. 

At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we came upon the firstaid post, a quarter of a mile from the opposite edge of the woodand but half a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun The firstaid post there was a cellar, half excavated, and half covered withearth, and roofed with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usualFrench doctors, stretcher bearers and American Ambulance men werethere. And there was the little cemetery, always found at a firstaid post where those are buried who die on the stretchers or in thedugout. It was lovingly adorned by the French with the tri-colourof France, with bronze wreaths, with woodland flowers, and wasaltogether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. They showedus a shell by the cave--a gas shell that had come over during themorning and had hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It wasgently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed--but gingerly. Othershells were popping into the place and fairly near us with someregularity and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me that wehad 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 goback. But we heard this:

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

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

It occurred to Henry and me, considering our feelings, that theMajor's nonchalant use of that "we" was without the consent ofthe governed. But when he started forward we followed. Our moralcowardice overwhelmed our physical cowardice, and our legs trackedahead while our hearts tracked back. The Major swung along the roadat a fast clip; Mr. Norton went with him. For short-geared men wefollowed 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 werecontinually on the duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm thatmade distance come slow. We came to a dead mule in the road. Hehad been bombed recently, and was not ready for visitors. Now amule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but in the transitionstate between a mule and hamburger, a mule leaves much to bedesired. As we passed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry beganhis kidding. He always begins to guy a situation under emotion. "Bill, " he cried, "if we die we'll at least save our nice newhundred dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And from me he gotthis: "And say, Henry--if we die we won't have to face our wivesand tell 'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit! There's thatcomfort in sudden death!"

It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen all there was to be seenof the war. Hill 304 would be there after the treaty of peace wassigned and the Major and Norton then could come to see it. Butthey 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 tobe a sort of trans-continental mule, but we finally got past himand came to the edge of the woods. It took about three ducks totwenty 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 thewood and were standing looking into the French trenches and at Hill304 off at our right, after the Major had handed Norton the fieldglasses and Norton had considerately handed them to Henry, who passedthem 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 wentover Wilhelm Strasse and scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. Therenever was another such shell. And we ducked--all of us. Henry saidhe 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 storethat hit--no retail affair. The sound was awful. And then somethinginside of me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had been readingDr. Crile's book on the anesthesia of fear, and suddenly it occurredto me that the shell had hit me and torn a hole in me and that fearhad deadened the pain. Slowly and in terror my right hand gropedback to the place of the wound, expecting every moment to encounterblood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched over, waiting forthe fountain of junk to cease spraying. Nearer and nearer came theshrinking fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, but somethingmore terrible! There, dangling by its apex, hung that pie-shapedslice 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 shrapnelhad hit it. Under a hat he would have been killed! So we went backto the first aid post--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheerforce 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 theway back, and not leave all the exertion to our companions. So weset the pace back. 

At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomedus back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our ownFrench guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. Itseemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as weknew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage--whichwas like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henrysaid: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, orelse it's syncopated. " Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly locationthat Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal inthe neighbourhood!" And to the assembled company in the dugout heremarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldogmodel that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemenwill get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Whichhe did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came outof the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back toRecicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed thegay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the bodyof a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met deathwhile we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk. 

We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before wecould get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinnedup the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used adozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And thatnight as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital, Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him inour corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth ofmetal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill, " he said gently, as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as Iever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you'rewearing 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 itwas not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laughat it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedinglyhot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went outin just such mild places as we had been through, and probably wentout laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter ofan inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita andEmporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeksunder what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused:"I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods wentout smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at lastwe slept. 

[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers upby sheer force of will and both hands!]

CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

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

One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulancecoming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking tosome American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticedthe arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans wereafter something in the neighbourhood--perhaps a big gun, perhaps anammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the targetwhen we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road. Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. Itwas getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that theammunition trains would be passing that cross-road at that time. And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our heartsjumped--at least Henry's and mine jumped--as we saw that betweenus and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded andstalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the roadfrom the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This, "said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mightydangerous place. " As the word "place" escaped him he was on theground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulancedrivers--Singer and Hughes--neglecting to unlock the ambulancedoors, ran up the road and began working with the drivers of thecamion to get the great van on the road again. The other occupantsof the ambulance also hurried to the camion--through the windowsof the ambulance; no one was left to unbutton the thing for Henryand me. Henry insists that he was there alone; that he was afraidto follow me through the window for fear of sticking in it. He hadnot been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for a year and had nogirlish lines in his figure. And the arrives were certainly bouncingin rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where wecould duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulancewas no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than anumbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully lookingthrough the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposurewas less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance thanit would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, heldfast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next"arrive" to come with commendable fortitude. And then it came. Itsounded like the old grand-daddy of all shells. We fancied we couldsense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway welooked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger. And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-fivefeet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree. We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then ourconsciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had beenstanding by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned oureyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked likea special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned oureyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier. We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of bloodand flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldierrise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light acigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but hadsprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had sometrouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second athis inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that deathhad reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impressionupon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change inhim. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves, a certain calmness of soul--or was it merely a dramatic expressionof a soldierly attitude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, whohad been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the shellheaded straight for us, it seemed that we should come back afterthe war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on thestump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We hadno desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about thetablet on that tree stump!

The French soldier strolled over to us; helped to straighten outthe camion, and when we learned that he was going down the hillwe gave him a lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poiluwho, washed and shaved and classified, turned out to be an exchangeprofesser from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, andit 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 isno hospital there. At the mention of the hospital the Major turnedto us and said: "That's where we sent that pretty red-headed nursewho came over with you on the boat. And, " added the Major, "thatis the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New York!" whose nameis 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--themultimillionaire?" asked the head of the American Ambulance service. 

"The same, " answered Henry, who turned to me and said in hisoratorical voice: "The plot thickens. " Then the Frenchman told usthe story of the raid: How the airmen had come at midnight, droppedtheir bombs, killing nurses and doctors, and how the disciplineof the hospital did not even flutter. He said that the head nursesummoned all her nurses, marched them to the abri at the rear ofthe hospital, and stood at the door of the abri, while the girlsfiled in, and just as the last nurse was going into the dugout withthe head nurse standing outside, the airmen dropped a bomb upon herand erased her! None of the nurses inside was hurt. Two doctorswere killed and a number of patients. Landrecourt was on our wayand we hurried to it. 

[Illustration: He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and wasirritated for a second at his inconvenience]

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 inWichita and Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, that wetwo thick-set, sedentary, new world replicas of Don Quixote and SanchoPanza should be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. Wewere not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wiveswere three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married mangets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of hiswife. 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, theEager Soul and the Young Doctor--sping! like a German shell--rightinto our midst, as it were. 

There at Landrecourt we found the Eager Soul, a badly scared youngperson--but tremendously plucky! And mad--say, that girl was doinga strafing job that would have made the kaiser blush! And the finepart of it was, that its expression was entirely in repression. There was no laugh in her face, no joy in her heart, and we scarcelyknew the sombre, effective, business-like young person who greetedus. And then across the court we saw something else that interestedus. For there, walking with his patrician aunt, we saw the GildedYouth. Evidently he had heard of the raid, had run over fromValaincourt 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 groupare keeping it equipped and going--a wonderful work. I mean hereis a real thing for a woman to do. And, oh, the need of it!"

[Illustration: "Oh, yes, " answered the Eager Soul to our enquiringeyes. "Mrs. Chessman--this is practically her hospital"]

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

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

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

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 wispof red hair, as she answered: "Well, really, I've been too busy toknow. " She turned absent-mindedly toward the figure of the GildedYouth, across the court. But the dimples and the smile faded andshe closed the door firmly and finally on romance, when she said:"On the record of service shown by my entrance card, they have mademe assistant to the new head nurse who is coming over from Souillyto-night. "

After we had told her that we were going to American headquarterssoon, she smiled again, to show us that she knew that when wewent probably we would see the Young Doctor. But she let the smilestand as her only response to Henry's suggestion of a message. Inanother moment she turned to her work. 

"Well, " said Henry, "some pride! 'One meets so many nice people onthe boat!' The idea being that her outfit at home is just as goodas 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 slowlybut rather directly around the court to us. It occurred to me thatperhaps he realized that we were the only social godfathers thatthe Eager Soul had in Europe, and that if he introduced us to Auntieit would be an indication that the affair of the boat, if it wasan affair, was to be put upon a social basis! And in two minutesmore he had docked Auntie at our pier. A large, brusk, well-groomed, good-looking woman of fifty was Auntie. Her Winthrop and Endicottblood advertised itself in her Bostonese, but she was sound andstrong and the way she instantly got at the invoice price of Henryand his real worth, pleased me. She was genuine American. Thething that troubled me was the fear that Henry would begin too soonto lambast onion soup. But he didn't and in a few moments we werehaving 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 wereinterested 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'sname, 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 placeto organize the Colonial Dames! I believe you said a few minutesago 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 mansocially, she had just met him coming over on the boat!"

The Gilded Youth looked quickly at me, catching me suppressing awink at Henry, who grinned at the expiring ghost of it. Then Auntieled the talk to the raid of the night before; and invited us tocome up for a night's sleep in a civilized bed in the hospital. Wewere quartered for the night with the Ambulance boys, sleeping ina barn loft, so naturally, we accepted her invitation. Just as wewere leaving to get our baggage, out into the court came the EagerSoul 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 tous, saying: "Would you be good enough to deliver this for me atGonrecourt next week, as you are passing? It is to a friend I meton 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 moonrose, and the hospital began to come to life. The stir and murmurof the place wakened us. And we realized what a moonlight nightmeans in a hospital near the front line. It means terror. No oneslept after moonrise. It was a new experience for Henry and me. So we rose and met it. And we realized that in scores of hospitalsall over the war zone, on the side of the allies, similar sceneswere enacting. The Germans were literally tearing the nerves outof hundreds of nurses by their raiding campaign--nurses whom theraiders did not visit, but who were threatened by every moonlightnight!

It must have been after two in the morning, when we saw the EagerSoul and the Gilded Youth walking around the court as they used topace the deck together. Once or twice they passed our window, andwe heard their voices. They were having some sort of a tall talkon philosophical matters, which annoyed Henry. The ocean and onionsoup and philosophical theorizing never seemed reasonable, normalexpressions of anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he professedto believe that persons who tolerated these things would sooneror later be caught using the words "group" and "reaction" and"hypothesis, " and he would have none of them. But for all that sheused the word group and once confessed that she was a subscriberto the New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; so he waked meup from a doze to say: "Bill, she's putting him through the eye ofthe needle all right. And he's sliding through slick as goose-grease. Iheard him telling her a minute ago that the war isn't for boundariesand geography; but for a restatement of human creeds. Then she saidthat steam and electricity have over-capitalized the world; thatwe are paying too highly for superintendence and that the priceof superintendence must come down, and wages must come up. Thenhe said that he and his class will go in the fires burning outthere--melted like wax. And she told him that they both had a lotof stolen goods on them--bodies and minds, and hearts cultivated atthe expense of their fellow creatures whose lives had been narrowedthat theirs might be broadened. And you should have heard her talkabout the Young Doctor--a self-made man, who had earned his way throughcollege 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 fromme, drowsily, came this: "Henry--do you suppose she will get aroundto that slapping tonight she promised him on the boat? That wouldbe worth staying up to see!"

"She'll never slap him. He'll never need it. She's talked him clearout 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 outof the danger zone into the open sea of friendship. "

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

But the buzzing about the hospital would not let us sleep. At threeo'clock evidently they were serving tea to the nurses, or lunch ofsome kind. The moon was shining straight down into the court; theGilded 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 thewings of death, " said Henry. A French plane flying across had filledthe compound for a moment. But everyone soon recognized its peculiarbuzz. Then for a few seconds from afar came the low ominous humof the German planes. But they circled away from us. Perhaps theFrench drove them back. However, it was the excitement in the courtthat caused Henry's remark. For the young people did not deflecttheir monotonous course about the compound, when the sky-gazers hadreturned 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 theirblood moved riotously. And there was the moon, the moon that, sinceman could turn his face upward, has been the symbol of the thingcalled love. And now all over that long line slashed across theface of Europe, the moon is the herald of death. Men see it risein terror, for they know that the season of the moon is the seasonof slaughter. Yet there they walked in the hospital yard, twounknown lovers, who were true to the moon. 

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

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

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

We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down thescore on our love affair. The record indicates that during theday Henry had lost; during the night he had won. He put it down inhis black book against the time when we should get to Paris, wheremoney would buy things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitalsor in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by dayand night after night we saw much misery and were "acquainted withgrief. " There are so many kinds of hospitals in France! The greatstreams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front aredivided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals intoscores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, wherespecialists treat the various cases. The blind go one way; thosedumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men withscalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fracturesas the sheep from the goats. Travelling about among the hospitalsone picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information;as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient manin Europe under pain. He likes to distinguish between himself andhis 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 botheringme a bit, Sir!" The Canadian isn't so game under a roof as he isunder the open sky and in the charge. And the American grunts morethan he should. But here is a queer thing. The French tubercularsoldier is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope. Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; butno American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. Hefeels he is hit hard; that it may take six months or a year to geton his feet; after that--he goes on dreaming his dream. But thetubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe. 

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

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

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

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it. 

"Only bran, " the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozencots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard ourquestion, came the echo of his confirmation, "Only bran to eat!"He soon caught cold, and soon the "cold" became tuberculosis, andafter three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, andin due course he and five hundred others were assembled, put on atrain and shipped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian inFrance. 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 andwomen, 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 Frenchfront. During that week we lived almost entirely in the war zone, and under war conditions. The food was good--better than good, itwas excellent, but not plentiful, and the beds were clean and fullof sleep. The only physical discomfort we found was in the lack ofdrinking water. We were warned against all local water. 

My feelings on the subject of the French coffee and milk weresomething like Henry's antipathy to onion soup. But we both lovedwater with our meals. We had been vaccinated against typhoid, andwe were rather insistent that we could drink any kind of water, ifit was reasonably clean. But men said "this country is no place todrink water. It has been a battle-ground and a cemetery for threeyears. " Still we insisted, and then, Mr. Norton, head of the Americanambulance, told us this one: "Out behind a barrage once near theChampagne; helping the stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, andcold. But there we were. We couldn't get in. We ducked from shellhole to shell hole. Finally I found a nice deep one, with water inthe bottom--oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot hole, and I stayed there; two days and nights. My canteen went dry, andfor a day or two I scooped water out of the shell hole and drankit. 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 withme and quit. "

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

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

So our taste for water with our meals, which is America's choicestprivilege, passed. Henry could drink the coffee, but it didn'ttaste good to me. The brackish red wine they served with the armyration tasted like diluted vinegar and looked like pokeberry ink. It seemed only good to put in our fountain pens. A tablespoonfulwould 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 beenover to visit the American troops and had brought back from thecommissary department much loot. Among other things was water--bottledwater, pure unfermented water. And when we sat at table they broughtme a bottle. 

Try going seven days on pokeberry ink and boiled coffee yourselfand note the reaction. Your veins will be dry; your stomach willcrackle as it grinds the food. The water in that bottle, a quartbottle, evaporated. They brought another. It disappeared. They broughta third. The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the sight. NoFrenchman ever drinks water with his meals, and the spectacle ofthis American sousing himself with water while he ate was a raresight. The waiters gathered in the corner to watch me. Henry sawthem, and motioned toward me, and tapped his forehead. They wentand brought other waiters and men from the bar. He was a rarebird; this American going on a big drunk on water. So they peeredin doors, through windows and stood in the diningroom corners towatch the fourth bottle go down. And when at the end of the mealthe American rose, and walked through the crowd, they made wayfor him. A desperate man at least commands respect, whatever hisdelusion may be. 

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

There we made preparations to go to the headquarters of theAmerican Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation RedCross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to theback of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of his uniform. Sex vanity expresses itselfmost gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me intouniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at theneck and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distinguish us fromthe "first class fighting man, " we were so proud that often fiveor six consecutive minutes passed when we weren't afraid of whatour wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. Attimes our attitude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunkenrabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped intocitizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sadheads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Brownebelts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn'tbreak me of the habit of saluting with a newspaper or a package ora pencil in my hand. And my return of the interminable round ofsalutes 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 wearthese uniforms only where soldiers congregated who would know usfor the gawks that we were and forgive us our military trespasses. Then a real day came when our Red Cross duties took us to GeneralPershing's headquarters. 

[Illustration: He was a rare bird; this American going on a bigdrunk on water]

For Americans during the year 1918, "Somewhere in France, " willmean the Joan of Arc country. It is not in the war zone, but liesamong the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' auto ridefrom Paris. To reach the American "Somewhere in France" from Paris, one crosses the battle-field of the Marne, and we passed it theday after the third anniversary, when all the hundreds of roadsidegraves that marked the French advance were a-bloom and a-flutterwith the tri-colour. Great doings were afoot the day before on thatbattle-field. Bands had played triumphant songs, and orators hadspoken and the leaders of France--soldier and civilian--had comeout and wept and France had released her emotions and was betterfor 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 gatheredunder one roof. Of course there were French soldiers--scores ofthem, mostly officers in full dress, going to the line or comingfrom it. Then there were fathers and mothers of soldiers and sistersand sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers bound for thefront or coming home. And there we were, the only Americans in thehouse, with just enough French to order "des oeufs" and coffee "aulait" and "ros bif and jambon and pain" and to ask how much and thenmake them say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fingers. Wewere having engine trouble. And our car was groaning and coughingand muttering in the gloomy little court of the inn. Around thecourt ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, forty feet fromthe diningroom, was what was once the stable, and what now is thegarage. Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur (from Utica, N. Y. ) tried to diagnose the case, found we did not understand andthen moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder American machine andthe Frenchmen, discovering that, kept coming back to it. As we saton the cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels against itand bemoaning the follies of youth which had corrupted our Freshmanand Sophomore French, there came and sat beside us a pretty woman. She had black snappy eyes, fresh dark skin, and jet black hair, socurly 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 BeeHive!"

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

"Sure mike! sir, " she said. And then added: "And if it's enginetrouble my husband upstairs is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?"And when she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to get alook into a twelve-cylinder American car. Henry stood by him, andwith the woman acting as interlocutor, between our driver and herhusband we soon had the trouble located and the dissimulator--Henrymaintains that all engine trouble is connected in some way with adissimulator--rectified, and while the job was going on, he expoundedthe 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 waspoor as Job's turkey, and then my folks used to borrow money at hisbank. Before we came to Oklahoma City we lived in Austin. We ranthe 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 inWichita. But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take the Beacon!"

"Henry, come here, " came the call from me. "Here is old Subscriberand Constant Reader!" Then Henry came up and the subsequentproceedings interested me no more. For Henry took the witness. Andthe three of us, kicking our heels on the cement wall below us, sat swapping yarns about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seemsthat in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from town to townon market day with notions and runs a little notion wagon throughthe country between times. She told us of an air raid of the nightbefore on St. Dizier where eleven people had been killed andurged us to stay for the funeral the next day. It was to be a sightworth seeing. Most of the dead were women and children. There wasnothing military in the little town but the two hotels that housedsoldiers and their friends and relatives going to the front andcoming back. Yet the Germans had come, dropped a score of bombson the town, then had flown away for another town, dropping theirhateful eggs across country as they went. Luneville had lost halfa dozen, Fismes half a score, and other towns of the neighbourhood, accordingly--all civilians, mostly women and children; and not atown raided had any military works or if it had a munition factory, the bombs had hit miles from the plants. 

[Illustration: Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left thelady from Oklahoma City to me]

We were beginning to realize slowly what a hell of torture anddisease and suffering this war means to France. Half a milliontuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homelessrefugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers livingin the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringingnew men to these homes left by their comrades returning to thebattle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commercechoked with the offering to the war god; soldiers filling thehighways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the space uponthe railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; andalways talk of the war--of nothing, absolutely nothing but thewar and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curseproves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shroudedtorches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really meansto the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we athome would react under the terrific punishment which these peopleare taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homescrowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildingsturned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mournersgoing about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporiaact with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever nearher; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break themorale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripplesfrom the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherlesschildren and children born out of wedlock among the things thatone had to face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought wewere 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 mistyplain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in thebackground were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and thething was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscapeis too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene mighthave been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-lookinggirls 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 ladiesin nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are notindigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they mightcome sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rougedready 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! NowAmerica was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. Aswe switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sizedand blood raw--a farmer boy--bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, withthe Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at aforward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo thesound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy ofhis own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and hesat 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" aswe passed, and then we knew that "our flag was still there" andthat we were near our troops. 

The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood. For in the nextvillage, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our AmericanRed Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy. Henrywanted a match. He could talk no French but a little boy at theinn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlightedpipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches. Henrygave the boy a franc--more to be amiable than anything else. Theboy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch! And just as we werepulling out of the village the boy came running to us with anotherlittle blue box of matches. We thought the boy had discovered thatmatches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparingto make his fortune. So Henry took the box, and as the car was movinghanded the boy another franc. We noticed him waving his hands andshaking his head. And when we were a mile out of the village Henryopened his second box and found his original franc in it. The boy'smother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box ofmatches, and had made him bring back the money with another box toshow 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 weredriving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths andsweating copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered in passingwhat an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thoughtof the two-wheeled French carts they were using. Then we turned thecorner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of Americansoldiers quartered in a French village. They were busy buildingbarracks. We stopped and visited them, and they showed us theirquarters: In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacantstores--everywhere that human beings could slip in, the Americansoldiers had installed themselves. The Y. M. C. A. Hut was finished, and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-timeon the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking Americanwomen at the counter across one end of the room. An Irish Catholicpadre in a major's uniform was in charge of the sports of the campand he literally permeated the Y. M. C. A. Hut. He was the leader ofthe men. The little village where this troop lived faded into theplain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to anotherand another and still another. At that time thirteen villages inan arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops. We stopped many times on our long day's journey. Once we stoppedfor mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our firstestrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, "how light a thingmay move dissension between hearts that love--hearts that the worldin vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied. " Well--thething that came between us was cooking--cooking that has partedmore soul mates than any other one thing in the world! For twoweeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eatingat country hotels or country homes in France, eating good Frenchcountry cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal typically wasa melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a smallbit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice withbrowned 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. Thatwas my idea of a lunch for the gods. What we got at the Americanmess was this: a thick, frowsy, greasy soup--a kind of lardeddishwater; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans with friedbacon laid on the beans--not pork and beans, but called pork andbeans--with the beans slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce, cabbage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread cut an inchthick, soft and spongy, boiled potatoes that had stood in the waterafter they were cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by pouringwater on bread, sticking in some raisins, stirring in an egg, andserving a floury syrup over it for sauce! There was enough, of course, to keep soul and body together. But the cooking had spoiled a lotof mighty good food. And Henry liked it! There were two preacherswith us, and they bragged about the "good old American cooking!"And when they heard me roar they said, "He is insulting thestar-spangled banner, " and Henry threatened to take my pajamas outof his black valise!

[Illustration: And he sat cross legged]

After passing through many villages crowded with our troops we cameto the headquarters of the American Expeditionary forces. We foundGeneral Pershing in a long brick building--two or three storieshigh, facing a wide white parade ground. The place had been usedevidently as a barracks for French soldiers in peace times, andwas 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 weretaken to the general. He seems easy of access, which is a signthat he plays no favourites and has no court. Anyone with businesscan see him. He met us in a plain bare room with a square newAmerican-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 havebusiness start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged straight tothe 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 RedCross was to play in the recreation activities of the army. The Y. M. C. A. Was spending millions upon recreation problems. The RedCross had millions to spend. 

Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier hostels, homes, clubs, houses where American soldiers can go while in Paris on leaveof absence. The Red Cross had one single donation of one milliondollars to be devoted to a club for American soldiers in Paris. The Y. M. C. A had started to equip two or three great Parisianhotels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated for certain otherrecreation purposes in camp. The Y. M. C. A. Believed it shouldcontrol the camp and Parisian recreation activities of the Americantroops. 

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

And then he allotted the recreation problems of men in the hospitalsto the Red Cross, and the recreation enterprises for men outsideof 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 hishearers' eyes. The politician looks over their shoulders. We spokefor two or three minutes with him about the work of our troopsthis winter, and were impressed with the decision of the man. Heseemed--perhaps subconsciously--afraid that public opinion at homewould demand that he put our men into the trenches to hold theirown sector too early. He evidently believed that during our firstwinter the men should go in by squads and perhaps companies orlater in regimental units for educational purposes, working withthe English and the French learning the trench game. But we feltclearly that he believed strongly that it would be spring beforewe should occupy any portion of the line ourselves. There was afirmness about him, not expressed in words. No one could say thathe had said what we thought he had conveyed to us. Yet each of uswas sure that the General would not be moved from his decision. He breathes confidence in him into people's hearts. He never seemsconfidential; though he is entirely candid. Again one feels surethat there is no court around him. He seems wise with his ownwisdom, which is constantly in touch with the wisdom of everyonewho may have business with him. He will not be knocked off his feet;he will do no military stunts. The American soldiers will not gointo action until we have enough troops to hold our part of theline and we will not start an offensive until we can back it up. This all came glowing out of the firm, kind, wise, soldierly faceof General Pershing, and it needed no words to verify it. Superfluouswords might have contradicted the message of his mien; for theymight have added boast to simple statement. 

It is all so orderly, so organized, so American, this thing we aredoing in France. It is like the effective manipulation of a greattrust. The leadership of the American forces in France in the armyand in the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. Is made up of men knownall over the United States; the names of those leaders who aresoldiers may not be mentioned. They have dropped out of Americancivilian life so quietly that they are scarcely missed. Yet forweeks we lived in the hotel with one of the prominent figures inAmerican finance who is working eighteen hours a day buying supplies, assembling war material--food, fuel, clothing--putting up scoresof miles of barracks, building a railroad from tidewater to theAmerican headquarters, equipping it with American engines, freightcars, and passenger coaches; sinking piles for the first time in aharbour which has been occupied for two thousand years, and unloadinggreat ships there which were supposed to be too big for that port. He is the marvel of the French. Hundreds like him are over therelending a hand. They are about to handle in a year an army half aslarge as the other allies have been three years building. Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation, communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation--the whole routineof life for a million men and more must be provided in advanceby these organizing men. This work, so far as these men considerit, is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing comforts at home, money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practicallyfor nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor'swise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of passingfame. For their names may not be mentioned in the news of whatthe Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wherever one goes in Europehe is running across these first-class men. Their sincerity andpatriotism may not be questioned. 

But they are getting something real out of it all. The renewal ofyouth 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 oldegoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their exampleswill 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 makingsof a hero tale. It came to us in Paris, bit by bit. We saw it andno 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 theirgods, a certain major god of finance named James Hazen Hyde, headof a great insurance company, fell into disfavour; and the people, changing their gods, cast him away. If men had been serving theold gods they would have said, "Go it while you're young, " to theyouth, but instead they said unpleasant things. So he went to Franceand vanished from the map, but he did not entirely understand whyhe was banished. He had done nothing that other young gods did notdo 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. Butwhen 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 tostop 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--notmajor generals, not even captains; but just chauffeurs and interpretersand errand boys and things. And young Jimmy Hyde, who had been thePrince of Wales of the younger gods of fashionable finance, andwho was cast out when the people changed their gods, came to RedCross headquarters with his two cars, and offered them and himselfto 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'suniform, and he was a servant of his country. And men say that evenin the days of his young godhood he was not so happy, nor did hisface shine in such pride as it shines today. For he is a man. Heserves. 

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 theaspect of her Old Home Town. There is a church, restored, whereshe worshipped, and the home where she was born and lived. It wasa better house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and indicatesthat her people were rather of more consequence than common. Wevisited the home, went into the church, and walked in the gardenwhere she met the angel; but we met postcard vendors instead. Yetit is a fair garden, back from the road, half hidden by a wall, andin it is a lovely drooping tree. A fair place it was indeed for anangel to choose. Some way Joan leaves me without much enthusiasm. Perhaps it is because she has had two good friends who have doneher bad turns. The Pope, who made her a saint, and Mark Twain, whomade her human. It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did herthe worse service. Some way, it seems to me, she could live in ourhearts more beautifully in the remote and noble company of mythslike the lesser gods, made by men to express their deepest yearningsfor the beautiful in life. The pleasant land in which she lived, the gentle hills whereon she watched her flocks, and the tendersky 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 hebrings there. 

When we left Domremy, the hills--soft green hills, high but neverrugged, stretched away in the misty purple distance and we droppedinto those vales where Joan watched her sheep and heard the voices. It did not seem impossible, nor even difficult to hear voices amidsuch beauty. So we fell to discussing the voices that reach thisworld. And Henry said: "Always there are voices in this earth--alwaysthey come in youth, calling us forward and upward. And if we followthem, though they lead to long marches and hard bivouacs, and tohumiliation 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, andGoethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought! If ever a landhad 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 thinfaint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills. It was an Americanbugle. And Henry caught its significance, and cried: "There is thenew voice--the voice that the world must follow if we find the oldpeace 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 headquartersof the American Army. There are four excellent reasons for deletingthe name of the town. First, the censor might not like to haveit printed; second, because the name of the place has escaped mymemory; third, because there is a munition factory there and itshould not be mentioned, and fourth, because even if the name ofthe place returned to me, its spelling would get lost in transit. In passing it should be said in this connection that it seemedto Henry and me that the one thing France really needed was apronounceable language and phonetic spelling. The village where westopped really was not a village in the Kansas sense; it was twiceas big as Emporia and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is70, 000. But the thing that made the place seem like a village tous was the town crier. As we sat in the car he came down the streetbeating a snare drum and crying the official news of the sugarration; he was telling the people where they could get sugar, howmuch they should pay for it and how much they should use for eachmember of a family a month. 

"Why, " asked Henry of an English speaking bystander, "don't youput 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 forthe weekly?" asked Henry. 

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

That stumped us both. In America every town of five thousand hasits daily newspaper, and frequently two dailies, and in the Westevery town of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper. With usthe newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. Acommunity of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper--and we foundthat this community never had supported a newspaper--was unthinkableto us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they knowabout the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they toldus that the churches recorded those things. How do they know aboutthe scandal? And we remembered that scandal was older than thepress; it was the father of the press, as the devil is the fatherof lies. How do they know how to vote? And they told us thatnewspapers hindered rather than helped that function. How did theyrecord local history? And in our hearts, we knew who had recordedso much local history, that most of it is not worth recording andthat tradition takes care of what is left. But how did they manageto create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the city waterworks, to establish the public library, to enforce the laws, to organizethe Chamber of Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that orthe 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. 

[Illustration: As we sat in the car he came down the street beatinga snare drum and crying official news of the sugar ration]

It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who thought our calling was atorch-bearer of civilization. Indeed, one may digress and say thatwe 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 peoplelook with the same suspicion on advertising drygoods and clothingmerchants as we in America look upon advertising lawyers and doctors. So newspapers too often have to sell their editorial opinions, andthe press has small influence in France, compared with the influenceof the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon countries. 

But in that French village of twenty-five thousand people withouta newspaper we found a civilization that compared favourably withthe civilization in any American town. While the tire was going onit developed that a cog had slipped in the transgression of thecar--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 fourgood bookstores there--rather larger than our bookstores at home. We found two or three big co-operative stores largely patronizedby industrial workers and farmers, and they were better stores byhalf than any cooperative stores we had seen in America. For withus the co-operative store is generally a sad failure. Our farmerstalk big about cooperation, but they sneak around and patronizethe stores that offer the best bargains, and our industrial workershaven't begun to realize how co-operative buying will help them. Wefound no big stores, in the American sense, but we found many bright, well-kept shops. In electrical supplies we found the show windowsup to the American average, which is high indeed; but in plumbingthere was a sag. We discovered that the town had comparatively fewsewers. The big, white-tiled bathroom with its carload of modernfixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber's shopin every American town--we missed. The bathtub is not a householdneed in France. Yet some way we surmised that if our towns couldhave better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easierin our minds for the palladiums of our liberties. And it can't belaid to the picture shows--this slump in the American book readingaverage; for the French towns are just as full of picture showsas American towns. That superiority in bookstores which lies withthe French over the Americans, should give us pause. It more thanoverbalances our superiority in country newspapers. And then aswe walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering uponthese things we came to the town park. 

It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street--"rightin the heart of the city, " we would say at home. Everyone in townwho moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had topass through that park. In it were certain long rows of grey-barkedtrees--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 afteryear through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "Fromthe old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in theheaven, " to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhapsmore or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thoughtof boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a goodthought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that littleFrench town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a dailynewspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall. For itcalled incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the thingsoutside ourselves that make for righteousness in this earth. Wein America, we in the everlasting Wichitas and Emporias, are proneto feel that we can make for righteousness what or when we willby calling an election, by holding a public meeting, by getting apresident, a secretary and a committee on ways and means, by votingthe bonds! But they who walk daily through groves like this, mustin very spite of themselves give some thought to the hand that"reared these venerable columns and that thatched the verdantroof!" 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 gentlyflowing river, whose beauty was sacredly guarded; a group of old, old buildings that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grownalmost like the woods themselves, out of the visions of men intothe dreams of men. And these dumb teachers of men have put into thesoul of France a fine and exquisite spirit. It rose at the Marneand made a miracle. 

And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France. Essentiallyit is altruistic. Men are not living for themselves. They are livingfor something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyondthe objects of their personal affection. Men are living and dyingtoday not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends orfamilies, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritualthing called France. We Americans who go to France are agreed thatwe have never in our lives seen anything like the French in thisseason of their anguish. They are treading the winepress as noother modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' bloodinto the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of course, as they dotheir hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers. Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He tookthem grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. Theygrumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revoltwhispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They willnot revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In their heartsthey are brave. 

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

"Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their heads in our windowshaking a beret and asking for contributions to help them enjoytheir week's leave of absence in Paris. My two elderly Frenchmenhad 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 whostayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn't givea 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 dismayof the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another throughthe window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing onthe running-board all this time with the train going forty milesan hour... A thing which was simply unheard-of in France before thewar... One of the 'privileges' which the poilu take!). Well, theyshook hands with me two or three times over and assured me theyhad never seen an American before... And indeed the two bourgeoislooked at me curiously. Then one of them began to talk boisterously, expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with aliberty of phrase which wasn't conventional at all, another poiluprivilege! They sat down, evidently for a long visit. They weretypical specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, quiteeloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower classes, the kindwhich leaves its shirt open at the neck over a hairy chest andcalls itself proudly 'the proletariat. ' The other was a fresh-faced, vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds tothe middle western American, a kind of Emporian! He hadn't muchto say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose. They both, through all their roughness and coarseness and evident excitementover starting on their 'permission, ' had that French instinctivesocial tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women frombeing afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and theywere both very sincere, and desperately trying to express somethingof the strange confusion that is in everybody's mind ever sincethe war... What are we all doing anyhow!"

[Illustration: They were standing on the running board all thistime with the train going forty miles an hour]

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

"'See here, you know, we've had enough of it... WE CAN'T STANDIT ANY MORE! I'm just back from the Chemin des Dames... You knowwhat that's been for the last month'... Then he gave me a terribledescription of that battle... 'how do you expect men to go back tothat... Do you know what happens to you when you live for twenty-thirtydays like that?... You go mad! Yes, THAT'S what happens to you... That'swhat's the trouble with me now... I know I sound wild. I am wild... ICAN'T stand any more... It's more than flesh and blood can endureto go back into that! Why don't the Americans GET in it if they aregoing to? Oh, yes, I know they can't any sooner... But why didn'tthey get IN, before! Oh, yes, I know why. I know... But when you aremad you can't stop to reason. We look at it this way... When we'renot mad, from having been too many days under fire... We say, as wetalk it over... There are the English... They've done splendidly... They'vetaken two years, it is true, to get their army really in shape... Butthey didn't have anything to begin with... They're fine... All thatwe could expect. But all the same, during the two years, Frenchmen weredying like flies... Just watering the whole North with blood... Yes, I've seen a brook run red just like the silly poems that nobodybelieved. And the Americans... Yes... Suppose this man and I shouldget to quarrelling. Of course you can't jump right in and decidewhich is to blame, if you don't know much about the beginning. YouHAVE to stand off and watch, and see which fights fair, and allthe rest... BUT WHILE YOU ARE DECIDING, ALL FRANCE IS DYING. It istime the weight of the defence is taken off France... There won'tbe any Frenchmen left alive in France... And here she is with allthese foreigners over-running her! Do you suppose they are going toleave after the war? Not much. All these Algerians and Senegalsand Anamites--not to speak of the Belgians and English andAmericans... There won't be any Frenchmen left alive, and France willbe populated by foreigners... THAT'S what we have to look forwardto for all the reward of our blood. They keep promising help, butthey 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 threeyears of war! It makes you into somebody else... You've died somany times you're like a walking corpse... Isn't that just how youfeel?' 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 makeanything out of it the way you do. That's silly! You just have tostick it out. Understanding it hasn't anything to do with it. '

"The first one went off on another tack... Still wilder and moreincoherent. 'It's the capitalists... That's what it is... They sawthat the people... The proletariat... That's ME, ' with a thump ofhis fist on his chest, 'had begun to see too clearly how thingswere going and so they stirred up this hornet's nest to blindeverybody... For in war even more than in peace (and that's sayinga good deal)... It's the proletariat that bears the burdens. Whodo you think is in the trenches now... Is the bourgeois class? NO!It's the labouring class. One by one, the bourgeois have slippedout of it. Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work inhospitals... Anything but to stay out in the front-line trencheswith us poor rats of working-people! Isn't that so?'

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

"The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denialsof everything he was saying. 'It's the proletariat that alwayspays... Isn't it so, Ma'ame! Peace or war, old times or new, it'salways the poor who pay all the debts! And they're doing it to sucha tune now in France that there won't be any left, when the war isover... Oh, it's got to stop. There's no use talking about it... Andit WILL, too, one of these days... Who CARES how it stops! Life... Anysort 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 thesame. We all will. That's the nature of the Frenchman, Madame. Hemust have his grievance. He must grumble and grumble but when it'snecessary, he goes forward just the same... Only he has to talk sucha 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 poiluis much given to contradicting himself flatly!) 'But never, never, NEVER an offensive again, from the French... You SEE, Madame--Neveragain an offensive from the French! They've done their share!They've done more than their share. Never an offensive. We'll holdtill the Americans get here, but not more!'

"We were pulling into the station at Meaux by this time, and as thetrain stood there waiting, I heard a sound that brought my heartup into my mouth... The sound of a lot of young men's voices singingan American College song! Everybody sprang to the windows and therewas a group of American boys, in their nice new uniforms, singingat the tops of their voices, and putting their heads together likea college glee-club. Their clear young voices completely filledthat great smoky station and rang out with the most indescribablyconfident inspiriting effect! 'Good God!' cried the dingy, batteredsoldier at my elbow, 'how little they know what they are going into!'The soldier from Bourgogne said nothing, but looked very stern andsad. The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, theother so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and thosesplendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolicepisode imaginable. There was America--there was France. 

"It changed the current of the talk. After that we talked alltogether, the two bourgeois joining in... Sober talk enough, ofprobabilities and hopes and fears. 

"As I walked home at one o'clock in the morning through the silentblack streets of Paris, turning over and over what that poordisinherited slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as earnestlyand 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 newoffensive is necessary... We'll do it! It's the only chance anybodyhas to have a world fit to live in!'"

When she had finished her story, Dorothy Canfield concluded somethinglike this: "That's what they all come back to, after their fit ofutter horror at their life is over. It does them good, apparently, to talk it all out to a patient listener. They always, always endby saying that even what they are living through is better than aworld commanded by the Germans... What a perfectly amazing distrustthat 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 notthe will of the leaders, nor is it the will of the many combinedin a common will. For the many are tired unto death of war. But forall that they will fight on without flinching. It is the nationalwill--the will deeper than the will of leaders, stronger than themolten will of the many in one purpose. It is the tradition ofcenturies; it is the unexpressed purpose, perhaps unconscious habitof an old, old people, united far down in the roots of them; notso much by race, for the Franks are of many breeds; not so muchby industrial or geographical ties or even political unity, thoughit approaches that; but bound most surely by the sense of nationaltradition. A people is fighting. From a thousand villages withtheir primeval temples, with their lovely cathedrals grown out ofthe hearts of the race buried in the shadow of their spires, fromthe shining rivers that flow through green pastures, from soft hillsrich in folk tales of heroes, come the millions; and from Paris, ever radiant in her venerable youth, come other millions who makethis 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 willnot stop. It is a spirit that is fighting in France, the spirit ofa brave people. 

We have in France a few hundred thousand men and will soon have amillion and more who are offering their lives in Service. But thewhole French nation is giving thus. And it is without hate. Onefinds instead of hatred in France a feeling of deep disgust for theGerman and all his works. The spirit of the French is not vicious. It is beautiful. When the war ceases that may subside, may retireto the under consciousness of the people. But it will not depart. It also will remain eternally a part of the salvage of this war. 

By the time the transgression of our car had been sufficientlyatoned for, dusk was falling. And Henry broke away from the gothicarches of the trees and made for a tavern. He had learned thatone must take food in France where he can find it, and ten minuteslater we came upon him in front of the inn, talking in a slow loudvoice to what was either the inn-keeper's daughter or his prettyyoung wife thus: "I said, " Henry paused and nodded his head and beatthe thing in with his hand; "we want some supper--de jurnay--tootsweet!" She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders very prettilyand said she could not "say pa. " And Henry laughed and went on, still enunciating each word distinctly. "Ah, don't tell us you can't'Say pa': say 'wee wee. '" And again he told her "toot sweet. " Thatwas the only part of the French language that Henry was entirelysure of--that and "comb be-ah!" But we could not get it throughher head. So we loaded ourselves into the car and headed back forSt. Dizier, where at least they understood Henry's gestures, andwe could get food!

Our next journey took us to the greatest training camp in theallied part of the world. It is not the largest camp, of course. It accommodates less than twenty thousand soldiers. But it is whatmight be called the post graduate college of all training camps. Here ten thousand men come every week from other training campsall over the earth, and are given intensive training. For six days, eighteen and twenty hours a day, these soldiers, trained by manymonths' labour on other fields, are given the Ph. D. In battle lore, and are turned out the seventh day after a Saturday night lectureon hate, and shot straight up to the front. In all France there isno more grisly place for the weak-stomached man than this trainingcamp--not even the front line trenches will kick up his gorge moresedulously. Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough. One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, and in the tenthousand acre plain one sees horse-men galloping, soldiers running, great trucks and tanks lumbering over the field; men digging, menthrowing hand-grenades, men clambering over trench walls, stumblingover crater holes, men doing all the innumerable things that arelearned by those who carry on the handicraft of war. 

But when one starts with the first class and goes along throughthe day's work with it, the deadly seriousness of the training getsto him. The first thing the first class does is to gather around asergeant major, who in a few simple words tells his pupils how touse the bayonet. Then they go out and use the bayonet as he hastaught them. Then the pupils gather around another sergeant major, who tells them how to use the hand-grenade or the knife or the buttof a gun, and the simple-hearted lads go out and use the grenade, the knife, or the butt of the gun. At length they are taken toa part of the ground where some trenches are sunken in the earth. Before the trenches are barbed wire entanglements and deep jaggedshell craters. The imitation enemy trenches badly bombed by barragelie twenty rods beyond. The men are taken in hand by the amiablesergeant major and taught to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, tosimulate the most murderous passion, and the simulation of a huskyyouth in his twenties of a murderous passion is realistic enoughto make your flesh creep; for the very simulation produces thepassion, as every wise man's son doth know. Then the youths arelined up in the trench, and numbered "one-two; one-two; one-two";clear down the trench. Then the order is given to go over the top. Every gun rattles on the trench-top, and the second lieutenantgoes over. In the English papers the list of dead begins "Secondlieutenant, unless otherwise designated. " And in the war zone thesecond lieutenants are known as "The suicides' club. " Well, thesecond lieutenants get on top, and, down in the trench, number onehands his leg to number two; clear down the line; number two boostsnumber one to the top, then number one lends a hand to number twoand pulls him out. Meanwhile enemy fire is hot. The line forms inopen order. The blood curdling yells begin--and mingle in an animalroar that sounds like the howl of an orang-outang in the circusjust before it is fed at the after-show! It is the voice of hell. Then the line walks--not runs, but walks under machine gun andshell fire to the enemy trench; for experience has proven that ifthe men run into that fire they will be out of breath and probablygo down in the hand-to-hand, knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye conflict withknife and bayonet and gun butt that always occurs when they go overthe top to charge the enemy trench. As they near the enemy trenchthe bestial howl rises, and as they jump into the shell-shatteredtrenches the howl is maniacal. In the trenches are canvas bags madeto represent wounded enemies. The first wave over the top leavesthese bags for the stretcher bearers. But by the time the nextwave comes over, or the third wave comes, the stretcher bearersare supposed to have cleared the trenches of wounded enemies, andafter that every soldier is supposed to jab his bayonet in everybag in the trenches, as he is expected to jab every dead body, toprevent an enemy from playing possum and then getting to a presumablydisabled enemy machine gun and shooting our soldiers in the back. Every time a student soldier jabs a canvas bag he snarls and growlslike a jackal, and if he misses a bag it counts against him in theday's markings. Wave after wave comes over, and prisoners are sentto the rear, if there are guards to take them. If not prisoners arekilled, and one does not waste ammunition on them. It may be wellto pause here to say that in the gentle art of murdering the businessof taking prisoners is not elaborately worked out. They learn thatby rote, rather than by note. The Canadians, since two of theirmen were crucified by the Prussians, take few Prussian prisoners. Here is a snap-back of the film. It is the Rue di Rivoli in Paris. Two lanky youngsters in Canadian uniform are talking to Henry andme. 

"What part of the states do you Canadians come from?" we ask. Theygrin and answer, "San Francisco. "

WE: "What's this story about you Canadians not taking any prisoners?"

THEY: "Oh, we take prisoners--all right, I guess!"

WE: "Well, how often?"

THEY: "Oh, sometimes. "

WE: "Come on now, boys, as Californians to Kansans, tell us thetruth. "

The tall one looked at the short one for permission to tell thetruth, and got it. Then he said:

"Well, it's like this. We go into a trench after them damn bruteshas been playing machine guns on us, knowing as soon as we getin they'll surrender, but trying to kill as many of us as theycan before they give up. Then they raise up their hands and beginyelling, 'Kamerade, Kamerade, ' and someone says, 'Come on, fellers, let's take this poor beggar, ' and we're about to do it when alongcomes a chap and sees this devil, and up goes a gun by the barrel, and whack it comes down on the Boche's head, and the feller says, 'No, damn him, he killed my pal, ' and we polishes him off! polisheshim off and cleans out the trench. "

[Illustration: "What part of the States do you Canadians comefrom?"]

WE: "Now, boys, does that always happen? How often do you fellowspolish Fritzie off and clean up the trench?"

THEY (after the short one had nodded to the tall one): "Well, mister, I'll tell you. It's got so it's mighty damn risky for anyPrussian to surrender to any Canadian!"

When the line out there in the training camp has gone to itsobjective, which usually is the third or fourth enemy trench, themen begin digging in. Then they go back to the sergeant major formore instructions. The digging in is usually done under a curtainof fire to protect them. It is a great picture. 

In another part of the field we saw the engineers learning tomake tunnels under the enemy; saw the engineers blowing up enemytrenches--a pleasant and exciting spectacle; saw the engineersmaking camouflage, and it may interest the gentle reader to knowthat one of the niftiest bits of camouflage we saw was over a Frenchseventy-five gun. It was set in the field. A rail-road siding ranto it. On a canvas over the gun two rails and the usual number ofties were painted, and the track ran on beyond. Fifty feet in theair one could not tell that the gun was there. 

The liveliest part of this martial cloister was the section devotedto the bayonet practice. And as we watched the men trying to ripthe vest buttons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrangementswith a bayonet, while loping along at full speed, we recalled aCivil War story which may well be revived here. A Down-easter fromVermont and a Southerner were going around and around one day atShiloh, each trying to get the other with the bayonet, but bothwere good dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting winded hecried between puffs:

"Watch aout--! Mind what yer dewin'! Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yewgot no sense! You'll stick the pint of thet thing in my boawels, if you ain't keerful!"

We heard a lot of shivery stories around that training camp. Theytold us that the French chasseurs, the famous blue devils, weremore or less careless about the way they forgot to take prisoners. They are a proud people, from the French Alps, and exceedinglydemocratic. A German brigadier, caught under their barrage, cameup to a troop of chasseurs and when they demanded his surrenderasked curtly, "Where's your superior officer?" They pointed downthe hill, and he started down. At a safe distance they threw a handgrenade into him and obliterated him, remarking, "Well, the worldis that much safer for democracy. " It is told of a Canadian whocame across a squad of Germans with their hands up that he asked:"How many are you?" Eleven, they said. He reached in his pocket;found his hand grenade, and threw it at them, remarking, "I'm sorryI have but the one; but divide it between you!" There is also thestory of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go out on a night raidingparty--crawling on their bellies with their knives as their onlyweapons. Finally two of them returned with new pairs of boots. Showing them proudly to their amazed Captain, they said humbly, "Yes, sire! But you would be pained to learn how long we had tohunt for a fit!" There is also the story of the festive Tommy whotried to play a practical joke on his German prisoner by slippinga lighted bomb in the German's pocket. The Tommy then started torun; the German thought he must keep up with his captor and Tommyrealized that the joke was on him, just as the bomb went off andkilled them both. 

Such stories are innumerable. They are probably untrue. But theyindicate what men at war think is funny; they reflect a certainimpoliteness and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it wearson it grows more or less unneighbourly. And yet the upheaval ofwar is just a passing emotional disturbance in the normal life ofmen. Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no glorifyingof war; men in war, at least on our side of the line, hate warmore than they hate the Germans. And with the whole heart of thecivilized world--if one frankly may call the Turk and the Prussianthe savages that they are--set upon maintaining this war to avictory for the allies, civilization may be said to be in the waras a make-shift. Everywhere one hears that it is a war against war. Every one is "longing for the dawn of peace" when it shall comewith justice, and in the meantime France is as deeply devoted tohealing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the war. Six hundredFrench societies are devoted to various war works of mercy! Everyman and woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse is workingin one of these societies. And yet life goes on with all thismaladjustment of its cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordinaryroutine. There never were more joyous dahlias and phlox and chinaasters than we saw coming back from that training camp where menwere learning the big death game. And when we came to Paris thereal business of war seemed remote. Of course, Paris is affected bythe war. But Paris is not war-like. One doesn't associate Paris with"grim-visaged war!" For if Paris is not gay, still it remains mightyamiable. At noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side-walks, and until nine o'clock at night they give a fair imitation oftheir former happiness. Then they close and the picture shows arecrowded, and the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and theirwomen folk at the opera and at the vaudeville shows more than atthe other shows. During the summer and the autumn a strong man puton a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was the talk of thetown. His game was a tug of war. He announced that he would givefifty dollars to any soldier who could withstand him. The strongman sat the soldier down on the floor, foot to foot before him. Both grasped a pole, and it was the strong man's "act" to throwthe soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back of the strongman. It is a simple act; one that soon would tire Broadway, butwhen one remembers that soldiers bring their local pride with themto Paris from the ends of the earth, from New Zealand, from India, from Canada, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China, fromAustralia, and then when one remembers that the men of his countryare gathered in the theater to back every local athlete, it iseasy to see why the strong man holds week after week, month aftermonth, season after season. Every night some proud nation gathersin the show house to get that fifty dollars with its favouriteson. And every night some favourite son almost gets it. And if thestrong man didn't fudge a little, pinch the favourite son's handson the pole and make him let go, almost every night the strong manwould be worsted. The struggle sets the house yelling. It is theonly real drama in Paris. We noticed that the shows of Paris whichappealed to the eyes and ears were far below the American standard. In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the highergrades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better thanBroadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste. Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follieswas Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to bein vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudevillehouse this year. Sometimes they were done in French, sometimesin English. In Genoa, one may say in passing that we heard one ofthe songs from "Hitchy-Coo" done in Italian. It was eery! Americanartists are popular in Paris. We saw a girl at three show housesin Paris, under the name of Betty Washington, doing a gipsy dance, playing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, who has a keeneye, noticed that she had her toes rouged! But she always was goodfor four encores, and she usually got a good start at the fifth fromHenry and me; we had just that much national pride! Great throngsof soldiers filled these gay show houses. The French, the English, and the Australians seemed satisfied with them. But the Canadiansand Americans sniffed. To them Paris is a poor show town. 

One night we fell into a Boulevard show the like of which we hadnever seen before. It was a political revue! The whole evening wasdevoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration, at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at thehigh taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skitswere done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms ofburlesque. A good crowd--but not a soldier crowd--sat through itand applauded appreciatively. Imagine an American audience devotinga whole evening to a theatrical performance exclusively concernedwith Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roosevelt, former MayorMitchel, and LaFollette. In America we get little politics out ofthe theater. In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they getmuch politics from the theater. The theater is free in France--andapparently not so closely censored as the newspapers. We learned thatnight at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapersannounced it. And in learning of the crisis we had this curioussocial experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian asthe Revue. During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henryand me. We could understand a vaudeville show, and by followingthe synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy. Buthere in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satirewere at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. Henry wasfor getting out and going somewhere else. But we had a dollar a seatin the show and it seemed to me that patience would bring results. And it did! A good-looking, middle-aged couple sat down in the seatsnext to us, and the woman began talking English. She was sittingnext to me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. We asked herif it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jaysfrom Middle Western America. She replied cordially enough. And shegave us a splendid running interpretation of the show. The man withher seemed friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding her handin the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when thelights went clear down. But that spelled a newly married middle-agedcouple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she, late from his office, was at the head of his household. Betweenacts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady. Weexchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner ofstrangers in a strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: "Whatdoes your husband do for a living?"

"My--what?" she exclaimed. 

"Your husband, there?"

"Who--that man? Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked himup in a cafe an hour ago!"

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy "Oh. " But we had a good chatjust the same and she told me all about the coming fall of thecabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics. But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theatersare free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takesall kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world. And the war really is being fought so that they may work out theirlives and their national traditions freely and after the call oftheir own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, thekind is easy to find. There is kultur!

Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry didnot mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable andas improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Everyman has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love frommarriage, and establishing it beautifully in another relation, ismy aversion, and it will have to stand. Henry was patient with me, but we were both genuinely glad when a day or two later we came backto the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperonedon the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we couldunderstand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity allover France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth inthe hospital at--we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not theplace--we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The lettershe gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to otherhands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should havebeen. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimentalwork in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. Butthe cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital fourhours out of Paris. The place had that curious French qualityof charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put intoour "places and palaces. " Down a winding village street--a kindof low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened withuniforms like the streets of most French villages these days--wewormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building--anofficial looking building. It was not official, we learned--justa chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a roadleads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse, or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. Butwhen we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard, gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard intoa garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the cornersof the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreensof some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree anda fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about thewalks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phloxand asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gaysorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--anew modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from thestreet by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital wasmade of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, builtarchitecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof torepresent "green fields and running brooks. " Board floors and boardpartitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of ironbeds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down thelong rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place wasAmerican--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. Wewere proud of it, and of the business-like young medical studentswho as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in theirbrand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice ashandsome and three times as dignified as they would have been ifthey had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of allthe ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the placea tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into aking's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital andwere returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He wassitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded. It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; butfrom the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bulletwound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the musclespermanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in themediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told ushow it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and onout to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land, stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with thewounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officerwith a shell-wound in his leg. 

He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening toanother man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something likea first aid to stop the bleeding, " the young Doctor paused, pickeda ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from thenarrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to theambulance. " Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a halfmile back and the shells were still popping--more or less--aroundus. " He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiledand went on without lifting his voice. "Then he did it"

"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry. 

"Well, how?" from me. 

"Oh, I don't know. He just did it, " droned the Young Doctor. "Wewere talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I lookedup. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. Itgot my hand!" He stopped, began poking the gravel with his toe, and smiled again as one who has heard an old story and wants to bepolite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on thehoary, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless ofour spanking new uniforms and cried: "Well, my Heavenly home!" Henodded, drew a deep breath and said, "That's the how of it. "

[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who islistening to another man's story in his own mouth]

"Well, what do you know about--"

Then Henry checked me with, "You weren't expecting it? Did he makeno warning sign?"

"Not a peep--not a chirrup, " answered the Doctor, still diffidently. Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a ratherremote past: "It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two menwho stood where we were together--I, who had put my hands in hislive flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, andhe who was clinging to my body for support--you would think we hadcome together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was overfor him!"

The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His mouth set. He went on:"This man should have abandoned his military conscience. But no--, "the Doctor shook his head sadly, "he was a Prussian before he wasa man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years tomake a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill adoctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's all very scientific, this German warfare--scientific and fanatical; Nietzsche and Mahomet, what a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and the Sultan. "

Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, in submarines, in air, in their planes bombing hospitals, and on land, lootingand dynamiting villages--in all their martial enterprises, thinkunlike the rest of civilized men. They are a breed apart--savage, material-minded, diabolic, unrestrained by fear or love of God, man or devil. We talked of these things for a time; but something, the quiet beauty of the garden maybe, took the edge off our hate. And gradually it became apparent to me, at least, that the YoungDoctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell himsomething of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For thePrussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand?What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuariesof lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, tofight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehowor somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and weknew it. So Henry asked: "You received your letter?" And when hethanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: "Did she tell youthat the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?"

"Only in a pencilled postscript after she had decided to send theletter to me by you, " answered the Doctor. 

That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the YoungDoctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably shehad not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to himafter the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicatethat she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis, and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth. Theonly question which occurred to me to develop this fact was this:"Did she tell you that she was made assistant to the new headnurse that came to supply the place of the one who was slain bythe Germans?" Henry looked at me as if he thought the question wasunfair. 

"Yes, " laughed the Doctor, "in the very first line. "

"What odds are you giving now, Bill?" asked Henry bitterly. 

"In the very first line, --" we could all three see the Eager face, theproud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the strayingcrinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat therein the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion inpride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that itmeant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understandabout the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in, "Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospitalyard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have twoto one. It's all over but the shouting. " And Henry laughed at theYoung Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at hisbandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yardwas disturbing news to him. 

"Ah, don't worry about that, " Henry reassured him. "Why, man, youought to have heard what she said about you!" And Henry, beinga good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had saidto the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzingmonsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of deathin the moonlight. 

We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all thenews we had of the girl. Long after we had passed through the gardengate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud archand into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, wethought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes intochina asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox, and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of themelancholy yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and desolation, with war's alarms on every wind. 

And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor evenin his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is thealchemy of love in youth!

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY

As the autumn deepened we found our Red Cross work ending. Thiswork had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper officesin Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the bigwar. For days and days we had been riding in motor cars alongthe line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances hadhauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches ofthe front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and hadsnuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made thefirst aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--mostof which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon orthe Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, howto fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope, and how to duck when a shell comes in. Also we had stood god-fatherto a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over andwas for ever being "continued in our next. " And it was all--ridingalong the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death alongtrenches, and ducking from the shells--all vastly diverting. Wehad grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression offelicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almostfinished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normaland reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick cameto Paris and tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temptation;"beyond the Alps lies Italy, " as a copy book sentence has lure init, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caughtus; and we started. 

So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, inSavoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumnday, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-greenhunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The twoRed Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green huntingoutfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large fromIllinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation. As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed aboutthe war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should haveto vote. So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinoiscongressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us, in uniforms ourselves, after a fashion, but looking conspicuouslycivilian, and incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea-greenhunting outfit looked more soldierly than we. For althoughwe wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissionedofficers--commissioned as Red Cross Colonels--and although we woreParisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that theyhumped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at theshoulders. A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniformwithout looking like a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling thetunics our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and enviously at theslim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their god-likeeffects. For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and afat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! So we paced theplatform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiersof France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked byus, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were. For theAmerican Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those latitudesas it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swingingthrough Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies, a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a milliondollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of NorthernItaly choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italiancities, from Venice to Naples. Under that flag the American RedCross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilianrelief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Crossuniform which made the soldiers' eyes bug out there at the borderin the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy. But wethree unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strangecountry. 

[Illustration: A fat man can't wear the modern American Army uniformwithout looking like a sack of meal]

Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa. And coming directfrom Paris, where men out of uniform were few, the thing thatopened our mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw. Therewere worlds and worlds of men in Genoa; men in civilian clothes. The streets were black with men. Straw hats, two piece suits, gayneck-ties--things which were as remote from France as from Mars, figures that recalled the ancient days of one's youth, before thewar; days in New York, for instance, where men in straw hats andwhite crash were common. These things we saw with amazement inGenoa! And then our eyes caught the flashy bands on their arms--bandsthat indicated that these men are in the industrial reserves, notdrafted because they are doing industrial war work. But for all ofthese industrial reservists there was an overplus of men in Genoa. It is a seaport and there were "the market girls and fishermen, theshepherds and the sailors, too, " a crowd gathered from the world'sends, and we sat under the deep arches before a gay cafe, listened toNew York musical hits from the summer's roof gardens, and watchedthe show. In that day--only three weeks before the German invasion--thewar was a long way from Genoa. At the next table to us an Americansea-faring man was telling an English naval officer about theadventures of three sailing ships which had bested two submarinesthree days before in the Mediterranean; some Moroccan sailors wereflirting across two tables with some pretty Piedmontese girls, and inside the cafe, the harp, the flute and the violin were doingwhat they could to make all our hearts beat young! A picture showacross the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and avaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity fromthe spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmicswish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music. Hereand there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning;but uniforms and mourners were uncommon. The war was a tale thatis told. 

But the next day in Rome the war moved into our vision again. Buteven if Rome was more visibly martial than Genoa, still it was notParis. One could see gay colours upon women in Rome; one might seestraw hats upon the men, and in the stores and shops the war didnot fill every window as it filled the shop windows of Paris. Romewas taking the war seriously, of course, but the war was not thetragedy to Rome before the invasion that it was to France. 

Yet there was to me a change in Rome--from the Rome one knew whohad been there eight years before--a change stranger and deeperthan the change one felt in coming from Rome to Paris. This newRome was a cleaner Rome, a more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome. Something had been happening to the people. They wore betterclothes, they seemed to live in cleaner tenements; they certainlyhad a different squint at life from the Romans of the first decadeof this century. One heard two answers to the question that arosein one's heart. One group said: "It is prosperity. Italy never hasseen such prosperity as she has seen during the past ten years. There has been work for everyone, and work at good wages. So yousee the working people well-clad, well-housed, clean and contented. "Another answered the question thus: "The Socialists have done it. We have had plenty of work in other years; but we have worked forsmall wages, and have lived in squalor. We still work as we alwayshave worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay inmany ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguardsthrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activitiesof capital. The Socialists in government have forced many reformsin housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profitsof labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better thingsrather than in fear of worse!" One may take his choice of answers;probably the truth lies between the two. Prosperity has done something;socialism in government has done something, and each has promotedthe other!

But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably. It has paralysedthe tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in theworld. But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted. Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful, eager, half-starved for every good thing in life, expatriated, living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension, detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world athome, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupidconcerning life's real interests--the mother and daughter who inthe old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe, flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, fromLucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following theseasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that preciouspair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to seeRome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done fordemocracy at any rate!

And the passing of this "relic of old dacincy, " the shabby genteelof the earth from Rome--even if the passing is a temporary socialphenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when theworking class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class asKansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upperclass, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it iselsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king istraining his son to run for president. The high caste Romans havean Austrian pride, that "goeth before destruction. " For politicallytheir power is sadly on the wane. They are miserably moth-eatencompared to our own arrogant princes of Wall Street or even comparedto the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out atthe wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them. One feelsvaguely that these Italian nobles are passing through a rathermean stage of decay. For a time during the latter part of the lastcentury and during the first decade of this century, the Italiannoblemen tried to edge into business. They lent their namesto promotion schemes, and the schemes, upon the whole, turned outbadly, and the people learned to distrust all financial schemesunder noble patronage; so the nobility is going to work. A fewstrong families remain--the present royal house of Savoy is amongthe strong ones. 

Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to theKing, who in the King's absence at the front with his soldiers, wasa sort of acting king on the job in Rome. The automobile took usinto the first court of the Royal Palace. Now the Royal Palace--savefor a few executive offices--has been turned into an army hospitaland we saw doctors and nurses dodging in and out of the innumerablecorridors, and smelled iodoform everywhere. A major domo, in scarlet, who seemed in the modern disinfected smell of the place like thelast guard of mediaevalism, greeted us as we alighted from ourcar; a great, powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on hisscarlet broadcloth. He showed us into a passage where the ministerwaited who was to take us to the Duke. The minister led us down along stately gallery, out of the twentieth century into the fifteenth, where at the end of the gallery a most remarkably caparisonedservant stood at attention. He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginablevividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth. But wecould have passed that easily enough. The thing that held us washis blue plush knee breeches. It didn't seem fitting that a man inthis age of work and wisdom should wear shimmering blue plush kneebreeches for everyday. He was a big fellow and puffy. And thescarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave the place an oldengolden air. But alas! The twentieth century burst in. For he bowedus to an elevator--a modern Chicago elevator inspected by an accidentcompany, guaranteeing the passengers against injuries! From theelevator we were emptied into a nineteenth century corridor, guardedby a twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him intoa waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brownand gold decoration--but modern enough--and walled in old tapestry. The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a uselessleisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backedstandoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs andbases of this furniture were great--unbelievably great, rococogilded legs--legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheeningagony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves todropping to the floor in distress. 

Henry nudged me as our Kansas eyes bugged out at the Byzantinesplendeur and whispered: "Bill, what this place needs is a bossbuster movement. How the Kansas legislature would wallop thissplendeur in the appropriation bill! How the Sixth District outfitwould strip the blue plush off our upholstered friend by theelevator and send him shinning home in a barrel. Topeka, " sighedHenry, deeply impressed, "never will equal this!"

[Illustration: He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth]

In this room we met a soldierly young prince, in a dark blue dressuniform, with a light blue sash across his shoulder. He shook handswith us. And he wore gloves and didn't say, "Excuse my glove, " aswe do in Kansas! But he was polite enough for the Grand Duke himself;indeed we thought he was the Grand Duke until we saw Medill and theminister stalking through another door, saw the minister formallybowing and then we found that we had been moved into another room--arather plainly furnished office room, such as one might find inNew York or Chicago when one called on the head of a bank or of anindustrial corporation. We had left the "days of old when knightswere bold, " and had come bang! into the latest moment of the twentiethcentury. We were shaking hands rather cordially with a kindly-eyed, bald-headed little man in a grey VanDyke beard, who wore a blackfrock coat, rather a low-cut white vest, a black four-in-hand ratherwider than the Fifth Avenue mode, striped dark grey trousers, andno jewelry except a light double-breasted gold watch-chain. He wasthe Duke of Genoa, who to all intents and purposes is the civilianruler of Italy while the King is with the army. We found four chairsgrouped around a sofa, and we sat while the duke, with a diffidencethat amounted to shyness, talked with us about most unimportantthings. The interview was purely ceremonial. It had no relationto the passports we were asking from his government to visit theItalian front, though this request had made the visit necessary. Several times there were pauses in the conversation--dead stopsin the talk, which court etiquette required the Duke to repair. Wedidn't worry about them, for always he began to repair these gapsin the talk rather bashfully but kindly, and always the subjectwas impersonal and of indifferent interest. He made no sign thatthe interview was over, but we knew, as well as though a gong hadstruck, when to go. So we went, and it seemed to me that the Dukeput more real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his welcome. It was half-past five. He had been at work since eight. And perhapsit was fancy, but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italianeye a determination to knock off and take a half holiday. 

We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean as General Pershing'sor Major Murphy's in Paris, or President Wilson's in Washington. Then it came to us that the king's job, after all, is a desk job. The king who used to go around ruling with a sceptre has givenplace to a gentleman in a business suit who probably rings for hisstenographer and dictates in part as follows: "Yours of even datereceived and contents noted; in reply will say!" We carried awayan impression that the lot of royalty, like the policeman's lot, "is not a happy one. " Talking it all over, we decided that in themodern world there is really any amount more fun running a newspaperthan being a king, and for the size of the town, much more chanceof getting things done. It did not fall to me because of an illness, but a few days later it fell to Henry and Medill to see a real kingat Udine. He was living in a cottage a few miles out of town in aquiet little grove that protected him from airplanes. Now Henry'snearest brush to royalty was two years ago when in the New Yorksuffrage campaign his oratory had brought him the homage of some ofthe rich and the great. Kings really weren't so much of a treat toMedill, who had taken his fill of them in childhood when his fatherwas minister to England. But nevertheless they lorded it over mewhen they saw me because the king wasn't on my calling list. Butthey couldn't keep from me the sad fact that they had started outto make the royal call without gloves--hoping probably to catchthe king with their bare hands--and had been turned back by theItalian colonel who had them in charge. Henry once sang in thecantata of "Queen Esther, " and Medill insists that all the wayup to the royal cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath thesong: "Then go thou merrily, then go thou merrily, unto the king!"and also: "Haman, Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured onein all the king's dominions!" just to show that finical colonelwho took them back to Udine for gloves that Wichita was no strangerto the inside politics of the court. However, gloves seemed to bethe only ceremonial frill required, and they went to the king'sbusiness office as informally as they would go to the private roomof a soap-maker in Cincinnati. They found the king a soft-spokenlittle man. Henry said he looked very much like the mayor ofKansas City, and was equally unassuming and considerate. He askedhis guests what had become of the Progressive party, and theypointed to themselves as the "captain and crew of the Nancy brig. "Then they talked on for a time about many things--such as wouldinterest the Walrus and the Carpenter. Then the accounts of thevisit changed. This is Henry's: "Well, finally after Medill begancracking his knuckles and the king began crossing and recrossinghis legs, I saw it was time to go. I knew how the king felt. Everybusy man has to meet a lot of bores. I sit hours with bores whoflow into the Wichita Beacon office, and I began to appreciate justhow the king felt. So I cleared my throat and said: 'Well Medill, don't you think we'd better excuse ourselves to his majesty andgo?' The king put up his hand mildly and said: 'O please!' and thecolonel in charge of the party gulped at my sympathy for the king;but I was not to be balked, and we all rose and after shakinghands around, the colonel led us out. And I didn't know that I hadcommitted social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when wewere in the corridor: 'Oh you republicans--you republicans, how youdo like to show royalty its place!'" Medill has another version. He declares that Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as hecould, then he rose and cried: "O King! live for ever, but Medilland I must pull our freight!" This version probably is apochryphal!The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: "Well, howin the dickens was I to know that a king always gives the high signfor company to leave!"

This Italian king is a vital institution. He could be electedpresident. For he is a mixer, in spite of his diffident ways. Whenthe army in Northern Italy was hammering away at the Austrians, theking was with the soldiers. One gets the impression that he is withthe people pretty generally in their struggle with the privilegedclasses. For he has lived peaceably with a socialist cabinet forsome time. He is wise enough to realize that if the aristocracy iscrumbling, the institution of royalty will crumble with aristocracyif royalty makes an ally of the nobility. So the king and theSocialists get along splendidly. Now the Socialists in Italy areof several kinds. There are the city Socialists, who are chieflyinterested in industrial conditions--wages, old age pensions, employment insurance, and the like; a group much like the Progressiveparty in the United States of 1912. We saw the works and ways ofthese Socialists in every Italian town that we visited. Either theyor the times have done wonders. And at any rate this is the firsttime in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generallyreached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into themiddle classes. Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the landquestion, and they have had smaller success than their industrialbrethren. We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. Our roadtook us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertileacres lying in a wide beautiful plain. We passed through halfa dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. Noneof the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here. The people in these towns are peasants--and look it. They are thepeasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of theRenaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Alongthe dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mulestandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart's approach. The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. Themules took their way. Carts passed and repassed each other on theroad. Autos whizzed by. Still the drivers slept. They were ragged, frowsy, stupid looking. They all wore colour, one a crimson belt, another a blue shirt, a third a red handkerchief about his head. They would make better pictures than citizens, we thought. In Romeand Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures. Allday going to Frascatti and coming home we passed these beggarlylooking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which stands proudly upona great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acresstretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. Villages flashedin the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards andthe tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye andsoothed the soul. We stood looking at it for a long time. With uswere some high officials of the Italian government. 

"A wonderful landscape, " said Henry to our hosts. 

"In all the world there is no match for it, " said Medill. 

"It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops yearafter year!" explained our host. 

"Signor, " said a friend of our host, "they tell me that this landyields seven per cent net. "

"Yes, " replied our host. "I was talking to a man in the agriculturaldepartment about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent. "

"What's this land worth an acre?" This question came from me, whohas the Kansas man's seven devil lust to put a price on land. 

"Well--I don't--" Our host looked at his Italian friends. They gazed, puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another. The discussiondeveloped a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land. With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable priceof the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points ofthe compass. Finally our host explained: "The truth of the matteris that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men. Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for fromthree hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy. "

And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarianSocialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich landand the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, strivingvainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out ofa dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yetlosing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of theland. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; nocapital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up thetenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world wherelabour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it wasa disheartening problem. 

Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on thefront, and there we saw another side of the shield. From Udine inNorthern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian armyat that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians. Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up thegreen soft mountain sides that face Italy. These roads have beenmade since the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them furnishapproaches to the Alpine heights. They are hard-surfaced, low-graded, wide highways gouged into the mountain side. Two automobiles maypass at full speed anywhere on these roads. And all night they werealive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front. Women helpthe men mend the roads. We saw few Austrian prisoners at work onthe Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front linetrenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line, and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians--workthat old men and women cannot do. Whenever we threaded our way upa mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelledwith deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches, and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with greatrooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain top aftermountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians. ThatGibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans. But they had few guns in their fortress. They showed us emplacementafter emplacement without a stick of artillery in it. They had toldthe French and the English of their plight, and a few artillerycompanies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need. Therewas no central council of the allies then. Every nation was runningits own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the fourthousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltarare German military strongholds that will have to be conquered withour blood and iron. Probably no battle line in the world today ismore interesting than the Italian front was in the autumn of 1917. The south face of the Alps often is green and beautiful, but generallythe northern faces of those mountains are bleak and rugged andsteep. The battle line ran a zig-zag course through the mountains, now meeting in gulches, now scurrying away up to mesas, againclimbing to the top of the barren heights. We stood one sunny dayon a quiet sector of the Pasubio. We were with the Liguria brigade, the 157-158th infantry. Through a peep-hole in the trench we lookedacross a gulch to another mountainside and saw there the Austriantrenches, not 200 yards away. Before them lay the ugly scar ofbrown rusted barbed wire, and just below the wire, sprawled outon the white limestone of the steep mountainside, lay fifty deadItalian soldiers who had vainly charged into the machine guns upthat formidable slope. They had lain there for weeks. It was thegrisliest sight we had seen during our adventures. 

Medill and Henry went to another lookout, leaving me with the Italiansoldiers in the trench. Their luncheon came up, a fine rich soup, with bread cubes in it, some potatoes and vegetables. It lookedpalatable and was good. There was enough, but not plenty. As wesat in the trench waiting for Henry and Medill, one of the heroesbeside me, after thinking it all out carefully, burst forth withthis:

"I livea in Pittsburgh. "

It was plain to his comrades that he had put his meaning throughto me. They clearly were impressed by his prowess. This cheeredhim up. He went on to further linguistic feats. 

"Is, I live-a there five year. "

That also got over and his comrades realized that he was a polyglot. Then in a joyous spirit of over-confidence, he waved the oriflammeof speech in our faces. 

"Is, my papa he live-a in Brooklyn. He keepa da butcha shop andis maka da roast bif. Is, my papa's brodder he live-a in Brooklyntoo. He keepa da saloon and is maka da jag!" Then we shook handsas fellow Americans. 

In another hour we had wormed our way through the tunnels to theother side of the peak, and had scrambled down the mountainsideto the general headquarters. Never since Hannibal's day were moreinteresting brigade headquarters established. They were nichedinto the mountain side about 4, 000 feet above a gorge below. Thesleeping quarters and offices were half tunnelled into the hillside. The diningroom was mounted on a platform overlooking the gorge below. Across the gorge a quarter of a mile away an aerial tram ran. Thatmorning two airplanes--an Italian plane and an Austrian--met outby the tram wire in a battle. It could be seen as easily from thediningroom platform as if it had been half down the block; yet theairmen were 4, 000 feet in the air. We had luncheon at the brigadeheadquarters, and it was made a gala occasion. Some one had brought inan Austrian cow which was brigade property and we had real cream. Otherwise it was a war dinner. We had hors d'ouvres--thin sliceddried ham, sausages, and sardines--a delectable paste with parmesiancheese on it, roast beef and brown potatoes, salad and broiledchicken, and then the chef d'ouvres, the cream upon a charlotterusse! After that came cheese and coffee. Chianti and a ciderchampagne were served. The mess was proud of itself, as it shouldhave been. But it seems sad to think how soon that Austrian cowwent home. For within three weeks from the time we sat there, thegeneral had surrendered in the gulch below the air-tram wire and theGermans had come with their big guns to fill the vacant emplacements!

We spent one night on our journey along the Italian front at Vicenza, and there, although the place was jammed full of soldiers, we leftthe war behind to stroll by moonlight over the beautiful mediaevaltown. There is a fine square there--not so broad as the square atSt. Mark's where the tourists used to feed the doves, but to meit seemed as beautiful. For upon the square was the famous arcadewhich Palladio erected around the city-hall of the place. It stoodbeautiful and gloomy before us in the moonlight, one of the world'sreal bits of architecture. As Americans we had a special interestin the arcade because it was typical of the best of Palladio'swork and our own Thomas Jefferson, studying it, had reproducedit and Americanized it in some of the buildings of the Universityof Virginia, buildings that have had a distinct influence uponAmerican architecture! A number of Palladio's other works we sawthat night, softened and glorified by the moonlight. And we sawalso an old French house, not twenty-five feet wide, but a gem ofFrench architecture erected before the discovery of America. Finallywe went back and stood by the statue of Palladio and listened to thelow rumble of the guns on the front and wondered what the Germanswould do with such a lovely thing as this Vicenza if by any chancethey ever took it. That day we had looked down from a mountain-topupon an Austrian town lying peacefully in the valley below usdirectly under the Italian guns. The guns of the Austrians and theItalians were smashing away at each other from the mountain-topsover and across the town. 

"You could pulverize that town easily enough, " Henry said to theItalian who was taking the Americans through the trenches. 

"Oh, yes, " he answered. "But it's a beautiful little town! Why ruinit?" His theory was that if the Italians took it they would wantit whole and would want the loyalty and respect of the people ofthe town; if they did not take it, why smash a beautiful littletown just to be smashing?

The German theory, of course, is exactly opposite to this. Theywould smash the town, if they were to take it, to put fear into thehearts of the inhabitants and command obedience; and if they knewthey could not take it they would smash it to cripple the enemy thatmuch! We of the Allies desire respect and loyalty that come fromreason. The Germans demand unreasoning obedience and denied that, they destroy. One philosophy is Christian; the other Babylonian. But the devilish strength of the German philosophy came to usmore forcibly in Italy than it came elsewhere because of certaincontrasts. They were contrasts in what might be called publicwisdom. The Germans take better care of their poor than some ofthe Allies. The Germans know that poverty is a curse to a nation, and during the past generation they have done much to alleviateit. And in alleviating poverty they have kept their poor docile;and they go into battle feeling that they have something to fightfor. In the allied countries too often we have let the devil takethe hindermost. As we rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan wewondered, looking at the farms and the farmers along the road, whythose farmers should be asked to die for a country that kept themin so low an estate. And yet they were better off than the farmersof Southern Italy. But in socializing industry the Italian farmerhas been forgotten, and when the press came upon the Italianfront, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay down their arms, deluded by a German spy ruse so simple that it should have fooledno intelligent soldier. But they were not intelligent. Theirintelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations, and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy! Youcannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousandyears' sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier whois even half awake!

As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a curious experience. There entered our compartment at twilight one of the carabinieri!We had been looking with admiration at the carabinieri for days. They were well-set-up soldiers, apparently of a picked gradeof men, who wore wide cocked hats, like those worn by the Britishtroops in the American revolution. The cocked hats of the Italiancarabinieri are as wide as their handsome shoulders and theymake striking figures. This one who entered our compartment wasdrunk--grandly, gorgeously and sociably drunk. He wanted to talkto us. He tried Italian and we shook our heads. Then Medill tackledhim in French and he shook his head. Then Henry squared off andgave him the native Kansas English--with appropriate gestures. Butthe Italian sighed amiably and it was clear he was balked. Thenhe looked up and down the outer corridor of the car, came in, shutthe door and smiled as broadly as his cocked hat. 

"Sprecken sie Deutsch?" he asked, and Medill answered, "Seemlich!"When it was apparent that two of us understood German he opened up. He had to talk slowly, but he was willing to make any sacrificeto get conversation going. He rambled along in a maudlin way, andfinally picked up an illustrated paper containing an account ofthe Turin riots, which angered him, and then and there being, thatItalian soldier told us in German the story of what he called dergrosser rebellion! To talk German in an allied country today isas much as one's life is worth. For a soldier to talk German is acrime; for a soldier to tell three foreigners about a riot in hiscountry, which he, as a soldier behind machine guns had to suppress, killing hundreds, was mighty near to treason. And we gasped. Wethought he might be testing us out as potential spies. So we shutup. But he ambled on, and slowly, as the liquor overcame him, heran down and went sound asleep with the offending paper in his arms. Perhaps he was one of those Germans wearing the Italian uniform whoin the German drive three weeks later gave commands to the ignorantpeasant regiments to lay down their arms and surrender! At leastit was reported in Europe that thousands of them abandoned theirworks under the command of German spies!

When we arrived at Milan we found there waiting for us a notefrom the Gilded Youth, whom we had met coming over on the boatfrom America. And it brought back our everlasting love affair. Itis curious how that love affair kept projecting itself into theconsciousness of two middle-aged men who reasonably may be supposedto have passed out of the zone of true romance. But the memory ofthe hazel eyes of the Gilded Youth as he gazed at the pretty faceof the young nurse there in the moonlight at Landrecourt, withsuch exaltation and joy, kept bobbing back into our minds as wesaw other lovers in other lands, married and single, crossing ourpaths. And there was the Young Doctor, diffident and reticent, whohad his heart set on the girl, and the contest furnished us witha deathless theme for speculation. And here at Milan came thisletter--just a note forwarded from Paris--telling us that the GildedYouth could "stand and wait" no longer; he was going to hit back. He had quit the Ambulance service for aviation. And he was ina training camp near Paris. We wondered how many times during histraining he would slip across the sky to Landrecourt to visit histrue love. The one-horse buggy had been the only lover's chariotknown to Henry and me, and we remembered how a red-wheeled cartused to lay out the neighbours in the heroic days of the nineties. So in our meditative moments we considered what a paralysingspectacle it would be for the neighbours to see a young man comeswooping down upon his lady love's bower in an airplane and Henry, who was betting on the Gilded Youth as against the Doctor, begantaking even money again!

[Illustration: We thought he might be testing us out as potentialspies]

Milan we found today is an industrial town, entirely modern, dominated not by the cathedral as of old, but by the spirit of thenew Italy. They took us to a luncheon given by the American chamberof commerce. We heard nothing of their antiquities, and littleof their ruins. We had to fight to get time to see the cathedral, whose windows are boarded up or filled with white glass; but theMilanese were anxious to have us see their great factories; theirautomobile works, their Caproni airship plant and the up-to-the-minuteorganization of industrial efficiency everywhere. Here in Milanwe saw thousands of men out of uniform, but wearing the ribbonarm-band of the industrial reservists. We fancied these Milanesewere bigger, huskier men than the men in the south of Italy, andthat they looked better-kept and better-bred. They certainly are afierce and indomitable people. The Austrians don't raid the Milanesein airships. They said that once the Austrians came and the next daythe Milanese loaded up a fleet of big Capronis with 30, 000 poundsof high explosives, sailed over Austria and blew some town to atoms. So Milan has never been bothered since as other border towns ofItaly have been bothered by air-raiders. The days we spent in Milanwere like days in a modern American industrial city--say Toledo, or St. Paul or Detroit or Kansas City. 

Turin is similarly modern and industrial, though not so beautifulas Milan. In Turin we saw the scene of the riot--the "grosserrebellion, " which our carabinieri friend told us about. SignorNitti, now a member of the Italian cabinet, who entertained usin Rome, told the Italian parliament--according to the Americannewspapers--that the millers caused the riot. The bread rationdid not come to Turin one morning, and the working people struck. Nitti says the millers were hoarding flour and caused the delay. The strike grew general over the city. Workers wandering aboutthe town were threatened with the police if they congregated. Theycongregated, and some troops from a nearby training camp were called. The troops were new; they were also friends of the strikers. Theyrefused to fire. Then the strikers built barricades in the streetsand in a day or so the regular troops came down from the mountainswith machine guns, fired on the barricades and when hundreds werehit the rebellion was quelled. And Signor Nitti says it was allbecause some profit hog stopped the ordinary flow of flour from thefarmer to the consumer of bread! There is, of course, the otherside. They told us in Turin that boys in their teens were found deadback of the barricades with thousand lire notes in their pockets, and that German agents came during the first hours of the strikeand spread money lavishly to make the riot a rebellion. Probablythis is true. The profiteer made the strike possible. It was anopportunity for rebellion, and Germany took the opportunity. Alwaysshe is on hand with spies to buy what she cannot honestly win. Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to France. Yet thejourney had been well worth while. We came home with a definiteand hopeful impression about Italy. The Turin riot, bad as it was, was not an anti-war riot. It was directed at the bad administrationof the food controller. Italy then was not an invaded country, asFrance was, and had no such enthusiasm for the war, as a nationhas when its soil is invaded. Italy has that enthusiasm now for thewar. We saw that her man-power was hardly tapped. She has millionsto pour into the trenches. She needs and will need until the endof the war, iron and coal. She will have to borrow her guns and herfuel. But she has almost enough food. We found sugar scarce; butterscarce, and bread sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants. Wefound two meatless days a week besides Friday and found the people, as a rule, observing them. We found the industries of the nationturned solely toward the war. Italy realizes what defeat means. The pro-Austrian party which was strong at the beginning of thewar has vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope has losthis interest in peace!

But all these things are temporary; with the war's passing theywill pass. The real thing we found was an awakening people, cominginto the new century eager and wise and sure that it held somewherein its coming years the dawn of a new day. That really is thehope of the war--an industrial hope, not a political hope, not ageographical hope, but a hope for better things for the common man. It is a hope that Christianity may take Christendom, and that thefellowship among the nations of the world so devoutly hoped for, may be possible because of a fellowship among men inside of nations. 

CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION

It is curious how the human heart throws out homeseeking tendrils. As we crossed the Italian frontier and came back into France, keenlonging for the Ritz--even the Ritz with its gloomy grandeur cameto me, and Henry confessed that he was glad to get back to a countrywhere a man could get a good refreshing bowl of onion soup! Afterdinner, our first evening at the Ritz, we were looking over thetheatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator atthe hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie, " the patricianrelative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilianclothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicatingour formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would havecaught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushedaside the levity of the opening. 

"Haven't you heard--haven't you heard?" she asked. And we knewinstinctively that something had happened to the Gilded Youth. Andwhen one is in aviation something happening always is serious. Itwas Henry's kind voice that conveyed our sympathy to her. And shetold us of the accident. Two mornings before, while making hisfirst flight alone, from the training camp near Paris, somethingwent wrong with his engine while he was but a thousand feet in theair--and over Neuilly. He had to glide down, and being over a townhe could not make a landing. They took him from the wreck of hisplane, to the hospital near by--fortunately an American Red CrossHospital, where the people recognized him and sent for his aunt. Allday and all night he had lain unconscious, and at noon had openedhis eyes for a minute to find his aunt beside him. "I brought withme, " said Auntie, in a tone so significantly casual that it arrestedour attention before she added, "that capable young nurse, thefirst assistant--" As she spoke she caught Henry's eyes and heldhim from looking at me. 

"You mean the one--" said Henry in a tone quite as casual as Auntie'swhile giving eye for eye. 

"Yes, your pretty mid-western girl. She is with him now. " ThenAuntie lost Henry's eyes as tears brimmed into her own. "It hasbeen twenty-six hours since we arrived at Neuilly. I shall returnin an hour, and--"

"I wish, " cried Henry, "I wish there was something we could do!"

Auntie caught our embarrassed desire to be of service yet not toassume. Her strong fine face lighted with something kind enoughfor a smile, as she answered: "Couldn't you go out and see him? Ithink no one else in Paris would be more welcome than you two!"

That puzzled us. She saw us looking our question at each other, and went on: "Life means more to him now than it ever has meant. "She really smiled as she quoted: "'It means intensely and it meansgood!'" Auntie's tired eyes gathered us in again. "When you leftLandrecourt last month he told me much about the voyage over hereon the Espagne. " The tired eyes left us to follow the crippledelevator boy who went pegging down the corridor as she continued:"about his days in Paris before he went back to his ambulance unit;about his meeting you that night near Douaumont, --at the first aidpost and--and I know, " she paused a second, pulled herself togetherand continued gently. "We must face things as they are. The boy'shours in this earth are short. He has other friends here, of course--oldfriends, but you--" again she stopped. "You will appreciate whywhen you see him. "

So we gave up the poor travesty upon life that we should have seenbehind the footlights for a glimpse into one of life's real dramas. 

It was nearly midnight before we came to Neuilly and stood awkwardlybeside the white cot in the little white room where the Gilded Youthwas lying. How the gilding had fallen off! All white and brokenhe lay, a crushed wreck of a man, with the cluttering contrivancesof science swathing him, binding him, encasing him, holding himmiserably together while the tide of life ran out. But when hewakened he could smile. There was real gilding in that smile, thegilding of youth, but he only flashed his eyes upon us for a fleetingsecond in turning his smile to her--to the Eager Soul, to her whohad brought some new incandescence into his life. Then we knew whyhis aunt had said that we should see him. He would have us who hadwitnessed the planting of the seed, know how it had flowered. Hissmile told us that also. He could lift no hand to us, and could speakbut faintly. Yet his greeting held something princely in it--fineand sweet and brave. Then he did a curious thing. He began whistlingvery softly under his breath and between his teeth a queer littletune, that reminded one oddly of the theme of Tschaicovski'sSymphony Pathetique--the first movement. As he whistled he turnedfrom Henry and me and looked at the Eager Soul, who smiled backintelligently, and when she smiled he stopped. We could not understandtheir signals. But whatever it was so far as it pretended to a showof courage, we knew that it was a gorgeous bluff. In the fleetingglance that he gave us, he told us the truth; and we knew that hewas pretending to the others that he did not know. We made somecheerful nothings in our talk, and would have gone but he held us. The Eager Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medicine, whichwe took to be a heart stimulant; for he revived under it, and saidto me:

"Remember--that night at Douaumont?"

"Where you whistled the 'Meditation from Thais, ' in the moonlight?"

"Yes, " he murmured, "and we--watched--the trucks--come out of themist--full of life--and go into the mist, --toward death. "

"Wonderful--wasn't it!" sighed one of us. 

"Symbolic, " he whispered. And our eyes followed his to the vividface of the Eager Soul, in the halo of her nurse's cap. She wasexceedingly glorious, and animate and beautiful. And he was passinginto the mist, out toward death. He saw that he had got the figureto me, and smiled. Then suddenly something came into his face fromafar, and he seemed to know that his frail craft had mounted theout-going tide. Slowly, very slowly life began to fade from hisface. Further and further from shore the tide was bearing him. Weseemed to be on the pier. The Eager Soul even leaned forward andput out a pretty hand, and waved at him. He signalled back with atwitch of his lips that was meant for a smile. And then we at thepier lost the last gleam of life and saw only the broken bark, wearily riding the racing tide. 

And then we turned from the pier and went our several ways backinto the midst of life. We were going home, and getting ready togo home is a joyous proceeding. And there was another significanceto our packing to leave Paris. It meant something more than ahomeward journey; it meant that for the first time since we leftWichita and Emporia in midsummer we were turning our backs on war. It took a tug to make the turn. From all over the earth the wardraws men to it like an insatiable whirlpool. And as we came nearerand nearer to war we had felt it swallow men into its vortex--men, customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epochwherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos--into nothing, to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm outthere on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealednothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of thehungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth, for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a race, for the creed ofan era. And we left them still ravening, mad and unsated. And wewere going away as dazed as we were when we came. But as we packedour things in Paris, the thrall of it still gripped us and theconsciousness that we were leaving the war was as strong in ourhearts as the joy we felt at turning homeward. But we got aboardthe train and rode during the long lovely morning down the widerich valley of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy with itssteep hills which seem reflected in the sharp peaked roofs of itschateaux, and through musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hardto realize that modern industry was hiving. The hum of industryseemed badly out of key in a town with a cathedral whose architecturalroots are a thousand years old, and whose streets have not yetbeen veined with sewers, and whose walls are gay with the facadesof the fifteenth century. The whole face of the landscape, town andcountry side, seemed to us like the back drop of the first act ina comic opera, and we were forever listening for "The Chimes ofNormandy!" Instead we heard the noon whistle. It was tremendouslyincongruous. How American humour cracks into sardonic ribaldryat the spectacle. The French are the least bit unhappy about thisAmerican humour. They don't entirely see it. Once outside of apoor French village near the war zone, that had been bombed fromthe German lines, bombed from the German airships and ravaged byfire and sword, some American soldiers, looking at the desolationand the ruin of the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, sohopeless in its pitiful finality, painted on a large white board, and nailed on a sign post just at the edge of the town this slogan:

"Watch Commercy Grow! Boost for the Old Town!"

But in that flash of humour the tragedy of Commercy stood revealedclearer than in a flood of tears!

We came at the end of the morning "to a port in France. " From therewe were to take the boat for England. And it seemed to us that thewhole place was bent on the same errand. English soldiers going homeon leave jammed the streets. They filled the hotels; they crowdedinto the shops. And the whole town was made over for them. "FrenchSpoken Here" was the facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcardshop near the grey old church on the main thoroughfare. It iscurious how the English put their trade mark upon the places theyoccupy. These French ports filled with British soldiers look moreEnglish than England. The English demand their own cooking, theirown merchandise, their own tobacco, their own beer--which is stale, flat and unprofitable enough these days--and they demand theirnative speech. When he gets in sight of his native land the BritishTommy quits saying "Donny mo-i, de tabac! Ma'mselle!" But bellowsforth both loud and long, "I say, Lizz, gimme some makin's! andlook alive, please!" So when we went to bed in our boat in a Frenchport, and slept through a submarine zone, and waked up in an Englishport, there was no vast difference in the places. Today Southamptonand Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for there the Englishdo most congregate. But back of the French ports it is all France, and back of the English ports is England, and worlds lie betweenthem. England, as one rides through it who lives beyond the seas, and uses the English tongue, always must seem like the unfolding ofan old, old dream. England gives her step-children the impressionthat they have seen it all before! And they have; in Mother Goose, in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, in the songsof British poets, in the landscapes of British artists! At everyturn of the road, in every face at the window, in every hedgerowand rural village is the everlasting reminder that we who speakthe English tongue are bound with indissoluble links of our fostermemories from the books and the arts, to ways of thinking andliving and growing in grace that we call English. It is more thana blood or breed, more even than a civilization, is this spiritualinheritance that comes from this English soil; it is the realizationin life of a philosophy, the dramatization of a human creed. It may be understood, but not defined, yet it is as palpable andsubstantial in this earth as any material fact. Germany knows whatthis English philosophy means; and for half a century Germany hasbeen preparing to combat it. Napoleon knew it, and believed init, when he declared three-fourths of every fact is its spiritualvalue. France has it, new Russia is struggling for it. Americanlife has it as an ancient inheritance, and as we Americans rodethrough the green meadows of England up from the coast to London, for ever reviewing familiar scenes and faces and aspects of lifethat we had never seen before, we realized how much closer thanblood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed. So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary whenwe were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishmanabout something a speaker had said in parliament the day before. We may love the French, like the ladies, God bless 'em! But wequarrel only with the English. 

When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through thegrey old streets, surface differences between London and the othercapitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts. These differences marked the different reactions of personal lossupon the different nations. France expresses her loss in mourning;she relieves her emotions in visible grief. Italy does this also;but her losses have been smaller than the French losses and Italy'ssorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France. But England'smaster passion in this war is pride. "In proud and loving memory"is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituarynotices of those who have died for England. Ambassador Page tellsthis: He was asking a British matron about her family, severally, and when he inquired about the son, she replied, "Haven't youheard of the new honour that has come to us through him?" And toher friend's negative she returned: "He has been called upon to diefor England!" Now that seems rather French in its dramatics thanBritish. Yet it reflects exactly the British attitude. The women wearno mourning. They do not go about in bright colours by any means. Bright colours in the war distinguish the men. But the women do weardark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutraltints of various hues. The shop windows of London are bright. Thereis a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, "Businessas usual. " The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs, and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways ofLondon, prove that London still is a great city--the greatest cityin the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as itis, cannot overcome London, entirely. Something of the fact thatshe is the world's metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhatapart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the Londonconsciousness, however remotely. 

One must not imagine that London is unchanged. It is greatly changed, for the men are gone. One sees fewer men in London out of uniformthan in Paris. And the Londoners one does see, all appear to behurrying about war work. But it is the women constantly in evidencewho have changed the face of London. Women keep the shops, conductthe busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seatsof the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweepthe streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggageat the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters, superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens beforeforges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass on farms, herdsheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of theworld's work that man has ever done. Now, of course, women aredoing these things elsewhere in the world. But London and Englandare man's domain. It seems natural to see the French women, and eventhe Italian women at work. Man is more or less the leisure classon the continent. But London is a man's town if on earth there isone, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and bafflingsight. 

Of course the men are not all dead--"they're just away. " Andthey come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal, and there is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its normalfunction. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moralbreak-down among the women of England. In England we were askedabout the dreadful things that were happening in France. The thingsthat were happening in France were not essentially evil things. Onecould imagine that if God thinks war is necessary for the solutionof the world's terrible problems, He will have no trouble forgivingthese lapses that follow in the wake of war in France. And inEngland, similarly we found that the moral break-down was not amoral break-down at all. The abnormal relation of the sexes arisingout of war produced somewhat the same results that one found inFrance, but in different ways. In France too many strange men arebilleted in the houses of the people. In England, too many homesare without men at all. And sheer social lonesomeness produces inhumanity about the same conditions that arise when people are thrownin too close contact. There is a sort of social balance of nature, wherein normally desirable results are found. The girl working inthe munition factories, working at top speed eight hours a day, filled with a big emotional desire to do her full duty to hercountry every second of the day, finds it easy in her eight hoursof rest to fall in love with a soldier who is going out to offerhis life for the country for which she is giving her strengthso gladly. She is not a light woman. She is moved by deep andbeautiful emotions. And if a marriage before he goes out to fightis inconvenient or impossible--the war made it so, and God willunderstand. Of course the idle woman, the vain woman, the foolishwoman in these times in England finds ample excuse for her follyand vast opportunity to indulge her folly in the social turmoil ofthe war. And she is going the pace. Her men are gone, who restrainher, and she has nothing in her head or her heart to hold, and sheis in evidence. Her type always exaggerates its importance, andfools people into thinking that her name is Legion, and that Mr. Legion is an extensive polygamist, with a raft of daughters andsisters and cousins and aunts. But she is small in numbers and sheis not important. She is merely conspicuous, and the moral break-downin England, that one hears of in the baited breath of the continent, is an illusion. 

The elevator girl at Bucklands Hotel in London was a bright, black-eyed, good looking woman in her late twenties. She wore agreen uniform with a crimson voile boudoir cap and as the Americanstepped inside the slow-going car, she answered his "good morning"with a respectful, "good morning, sir. " Being a good traveller, itseemed to me wise to prepare to while away the tedium of the longeasy journey to the fourth floor with a friendly chat. 

"Any of your relatives in the war?" This from me by way of anice-breaker. 

"Yes, sir, my husband, sir, " she replied as she grasped the cable. She gave it a pull, and added "--or he was, sir. He's home now, sir!"

"On leave?"

"O no, sir, he's wounded, sir--he lost his left arm at the shoulder, sir, and he's going down to Roehampton today, sir, to see if theycan teach him some kind of a trade there, sir, " answered the woman. 

The wonders of Roehampton where they re-educate the cripples of warand turn them out equipped with such trades as their maimed bodiesmay acquire had been displayed for Henry and me the day before. 

"Tell him to try typewriting and stenography, one armed men aredoing wonders with that down at Roehampton. Any children?"

"Two, sir, " she answered as the elevator approached the mezzaninefloor, "three and five, sir!"

"Three and five--well, well, isn't that fine! Aren't you lucky!Tell him to try that stenography; that will put him in an officeand he'll have a fine chance to rise there. You must give them aneducation--a good one; send them to College. If they're going toget on in this new world they will need every ounce of educationyou can stuff into them. But it will be a splendid thing for bothof you working for that. Is education expensive in England?"

"Very, sir. I hardly see how we can do it, sir!"

"That's too bad--now in our country education, from the primer tothe university, is absolutely free. The state does the whole businessand in my state they print the school books, and more than that theygive a man a professional education, too, without tuition fees--ifhe wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or a chemistor a school teacher!"

"Is that so, sir, " the cable was running through her hands as shespoke. Then she added as the elevator passed the second floor, "Ifwe could only have that here, sir. If we only could, sir!"

"Well, it will come. That's the next revolution you want to startwhen you women get the ballot. Abolish these class schools likeEton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. Allthe kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section ofthe country go to the common schools. Children should start lifeas equals. There is no snobbery so cruel as the snobbery that marksoff childhood into classes! When you women vote here, the firstthing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime keepthe kids in school. "

"We've talked that all over, " she answered. "And we're certainlygoing to try. He'll have his pension, and I'll have this job andhe'll learn a trade and I think we can manage, sir!" The "sir" camebelated. 

"Go to it, sister, and luck to you, " cried her passenger as he rosefrom his bench. The car was nearing the fourth floor. 

"We shall, " she answered; "no fear of that. " She stopped the car, and they smiled as friends as she let him out of the door. "Well--goodmorning, " she said as he turned down the corridor. The "sir" hadleft entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the womenof Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtainsin Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping theservile "sir" and are emerging into life at the fourth floor ashuman beings. 

It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purelymartial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the womanquestion as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, butparticularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that isforming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the Europeanwoman of the war is almost American in her liberty. 

"European women, " said a former American grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with me at an embassy in the dim lit gorgeousness ofa mediaeval room, "are of two kinds: Those who are being crucifiedby the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties whichwar has brought them!"

"Liberties?" asked her colloquitor; not Henry. He had no patiencewith these theoretical excursions into speculative realms. "Libertiesrather than privileges?"

"Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary, " purred the lady atthe embassy. "They come and go, but the whole trouble with thisnew situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of thecrucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never againcan return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positionsfrom which the awful needs of this war have driven them. Thecultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highestproduct of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the Americanlevel. "

"And the continental mistress system, " prodded her Americaninterviewer, ironically, "will it, too, disappear with the departedsuperiority of continental womanhood?"

"Yes, the mistress system too--if you want to call it a system--andI suppose it is an institution--it too will become degraded andAmericanized. "

"Americanized?" the middle western eyebrows went up, and possiblythe middle western voice flinched a little. But the wise dowagerfrom Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Centralbonds, continued bitterly: "Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. Thecontinental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that youmiddle class Americans think it is. Of course there are Europeanmen who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few monthsor a few years and forget her. Such men are impossible. "

She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe with a contemptuoushand. 

"But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-productof a leisure class. Men and women marry for business reasons. Thewomen have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, andclings to her for a lifetime. He cannot afford to marry her--evenif he could be divorced; for he would have to work to support her, and be declassed. But he can support her on his wife's money and abeautiful life-long friendship is thus cherished. It will disappearwhen men have to work, and when women may go into the world to workwithout losing their social positions. And this new order, thismaking the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will robcivilization of its most perfect flower--the cultivated woman whohas developed under the shelter of our economic system. I might aswell shock your bourgeois morals now as later. So listen to this. Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering. I talkedto a French mother this morning. Her income is gone--part of ittaxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in NorthernFrance. Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. In thischaos she can find no suitable wife for him. One who is rich today, tomorrow may be poor, so the dear fellow may not marry. And heis looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up afool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant's salary. Andthe weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her sonshould have no mistress as to have a fool! For a man's mistress doesmake such a difference in his life! My friend is almost willingto let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work! The worldnever will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring inthis war!"

Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe whichHenry gave when he heard it. He was trying to tell a Duchess aboutprohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas orprohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard ofboth. But Henry's other ear was open to what the embassy ornamentwas saying to me. On the other side of this record of the swan songof the lady of the embassy is this record. It is a man's voice. Theman has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a placewhere as manager of the London factory of an American concern, heworks several hundred employees. 

"Say, let me tell you something--never again! Never again for minedo the men come back into our shop. We may let a dozen or so of'em back to handle the big machines. But the next size, which wethought that only men could handle--never again. And when they comeback these men will have to work under women foremen. We thoughtwhen the war took our men bosses away that we should have to closethe shop. But say--never again, I tell you. And let me give you apointer. You wouldn't know them girls. When the war broke out theywere getting ten shillings--about $2. 50 a week, the best of 'em, and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, andevery once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls hada great joke about her--you know. And they would soak the shopwhenever they got a chance! The boss had to keep right after 'em, or they'd soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight theproduct, and they'd lie--why, man, the whole works would stand upand lie for each other against the shop. It took five men to bossthem where we have one woman doing it now. And say, it ain't thewoman boss that's done it. We pay 'em more. Them same girls isgetting ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now--Lawsee, man--youought to see 'em! Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!Goddlemighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that same measly bunchof grouches we had three years ago. And they work for the shop now, and not against it. They're different girls. I wouldn't-a believedten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it's sure doneit. "

"Perhaps, " suggested his acquaintance, "the girls are cheerful andcompetent because they aren't afraid of poverty. Maybe they aremotived by hope of getting on in the world and not motived by theterror of slipping down. Does that not make them stand by the shopinstead of working against it? Isn't it a developed middle classfeeling that accepts the shop as 'their kind of people' now?"

"Search me, Cap--I give it up. I just only know what I know andsee what I see. And never again--you hear me, man--never again doesour shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has madea hit with me! Have a cigarette?"

The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course, a gain in fellowship. 

But after all fellowship will be futile if it does not bear fruit. And the first fruit of the fellowship between men and women inEurope surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women uponthe destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knowswoman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest towarda just and lasting peace. 

Often while we were in London, during the last days of our stay, when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds wetalked of these things. There are two Henrys--one, the owner of aten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitablenewspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To methis was his greatest charm--this infinite variety of Henrys thatwas forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beaconbuilding and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for mytheories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellowshipwith men in the new democratization of the world. He refused to seethe democratization of the world in the war. To him the war meantadjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments ofpolitical and commercial influence on the map of the world. Butto the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many timessetting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing awayhis political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a manwould toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something morethan its military expression. 

And one night as we sat in our room waiting for dinner a lettercame up from the Eager Soul, with some trinkets she had sent overto us by messenger to take to her mother in Denver. After tellingus the news of the hospital, and of Auntie and of the wound in theYoung Doctor's hand, she wrote:

"O how I hate war--hate it--hate it! And this war of all wars, Ihate it worst. It is so ruthless, so inexorably cruel; so utterlymeaningless, viewed at close range. Yesterday they brought me intoNorthern France, and I spent the twilight last night looking overthe ruins of the local church. It is the most important small churchin Northern France and contains one of the earliest ribbed vaultsin France, they say. It was built about 1100, and now the thingis smashed. It is what our artillerymen call a one-shot church. Othe waste of it--churches, men, homes, creeds! How many one-shotcreeds have perished in this hell-fire! Still out of the old Isuppose the new will come. But I have talked to women, to peasantwomen in their homes, to noble women in hospitals; to womenin their shops and women on the farms, and I know that if the newworld brings them as its heritage, only the enlarged comradeshipthey are taking with men in this time of suffering, then one thingis sure: We women will strike an awful blow at future wars! Thewomanhood of the past, someway, is like these sad, broken churchesof France. It is shattered and gone, and in its ruins we see itsexquisite beauty, its ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faiththat once sufficed. But it will not be restored. We shall buildnew temples; we shall know new women. The old had to go, that thenew might come. And our new women and our new temples shall bededicated, not merely to faith, not merely to beauty, not merely toadoration but to service, to service and comradeship in the world. "

As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Itsemotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: "Well, Bill, I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes herworth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to thepublic conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however itis settled. "

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"

Finally our talk left the war and its meaning, and we fell towondering how the Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and we thoughtof the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love anddeath and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the gardenamong the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier ordoctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped tothe floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly they haddropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul. He openedone and remarked:

"Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here on the margin, 'Versesby our Doctor friend. I thought you'd like to see them. See othersheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he tried to whistlethat night. He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor's words. '"Then Henry unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, wasthe air, evidently copied by the girl from the melody written bythe Gilded Youth. And clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovskimelody from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, that dominatedthe air. [Footnote: For the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote tothe Young Doctor's verses the reader should see appendix "A. "] Thefine thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that air back toher, and to play the game of courage to us! Henry read the verses;they were headed "A Soldier's Song. " They were very much such rhymesas we wrote when we were young. They ran:

 Love, though these hands, that rest in thine so dear, Back into dust may crumble with the year; Love, though these lips, that meet thy lips so true, Soon may be grass that stores the morning dew-- O Love, know well, that this fond heart of mine, It shall be always, always--thine!

 Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but this; Love, though our faith shall be our rarest bliss; Love, though the years may bring their death and chill, Love, though our blood shall lose its passion, still-- Still, Love, know well that this heart is divine, It shall be always--always, thine!

Henry sat holding the sheet and looking through the wall of theroom in Buckland's hotel across twenty years, down an elm-shadedpath in the little town of Baldwin, Kansas--thousands of miles andseemingly thousands of years away!

"Well, " he sighed. "In the note here she's got her he's badly mixed. But we know what she means. And I don't blame them; any boy in histwenties ought to go singing, with one voice or another, after sucha girl!"

And then we knew what the Young Doctor was doing there in the gardenamong the adoring flowers. He was writing those verses. And, wein our forties, after such things have passed, were sitting in acommonplace room in a comfortable hotel, five hundred miles from thebattle and twenty years from the primrose path, trying to imagineit all. And like Stephen Blackpool in Dickens' "Hard Times" aboutall we could make of it was that it was a mess! They were both soremote, the love affair that had followed us over Europe, and thewar which we had followed so wearily. The love affair was of coursea look backward, for us, to days "when lutes were touched and songswere sung"; but the war and all its significance stretched ahead. It portended change. For change always follows war. 

Yet life, in spite of the current of war twisting so many thingsaskew, does proceed in England calmly, and in something like order. As we looked back upon our London experience it seemed to Henryand me that we were hurrying from luncheons to teas and teas todinners and from dinners to the second act of good shows all thetime. For in London we had no Red Cross duties. We were on our wayhome, and people were kind to us, and best of all we could speakthe language--after a fashion--and understand in a general waywhat was going on. We had dined at two American embassies on thecontinent and had worn our tail coats. Of course Red Cross uniformswere proper evening regalia at any social function. But someway aflannel shirt and a four-in-hand tie--even a khaki coloured tie, did not seem to Henry and me de rigueur. We weren't raised thatway and we couldn't come to it. So we wore our tails. We noticed inFrance and Italy that other men wore dinner coats, and we bemoanedour stupidity in bringing our tails and leaving our dinner coatsin New York. We fancied in our blindness that on the continent noone noticed the difference. But in England, there doubt disappeared. Whenever we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some Englishladyship through a lorgnette or a spyglass of some kind gave usthe once-over with the rough blade of her social disapproval andwe felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky partyand dropped into a grand ball. But we couldn't help it. How shouldwe have known, without our wives to pack our trunks for us in NewYork, that tails had atrophied in European society and that uniformsand dinner coats had taken their place. 

But other things have disappeared from Great Britain sincewar began, and Henry was doomed to walk the island vainly lookingfor the famed foods of old England. All through Italy and France, where onion soup and various pastes were served to us, Henry atethem, but in a fond hope that when we got to England he would havesome of the "superior comestibles" which a true lover of Dickenshad a right to expect. The French were given to ragouts and Latintranslations of Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered inonions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy green groceries, and these messed dishes irritated Henry. He is the kind of anold-fashioned man who likes to take his food straight. If he eatsonions, he demands that they shall be called onions, or if they servehim carrots, he must know specifically that he is eating carrots, and he wants his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and nononsense about it. Similarly he wants his veal served by itself, andwhen they bring him a smoking brown casserole of browned vegetables, browned gravy and browned meat, he pokes his fork into it, sniffs, "another cat mess, " pushes it aside and asks for eatable food! Soall over the continent he was bragging about what he was going todo to "the roast beef of old England, " and was getting ready forYorkshire pudding with it. It was sweet to hear Henry's honestbark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep-mouthed welcome to SamWeller's "'am and weal pie, " and even Pickwick's "chops and tomatosauce, " and David Copperfield's toasted muffins, as we drew nearthe chalk cliffs of England. Also he was going to find what an "eelpie" was, and he had a dozen Dickensonian dishes that he proposedto explore, dishes whose very names would make a wooden Indian'smouth water. But when he got there the cupboard was bare. Englandwas going on rations. Fats were scarce, sugars were rare, starcheswere controlled by the food board. And who could make a curranttart without these? He dropped two bullet-sized brown biscuits witha hazelnut of butter under his vest the first three minutes of ourfirst breakfast and asked for another round, after he had takenmine. 

[Illustration: And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped froma tacky party and dropped into a grand ball]

"That's your allowance, sir, " said the waitress, and money wouldbuy no more. 

He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; that was his allowanceof sugar. We went out to lunch. Henry ordered the roast beef of oldEngland at the best club in London and got a pink shaving, escortedin by two boiled potatoes and a hunk of green cabbage, boiledwithout salt or pork. And for dessert we had a sugarless, lardlesswhole-wheat-flour tart! It puckered his mouth like a persimmon. Itfell to me to explain to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon, that Henry had just come from the continent, where he had scornedthe food, and one could see from the twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyesthat he was going to put Henry in a book. And he certainly wasa hero during those London days--the hero of a great disillusion. Of course the British cooking was good. The English are splendidcooks, and they were doing their best; but Henry's picture of thegreat boar's head triumphantly borne into the hall on the shouldersof four stout butlers, and his notion of the blazing plum puddingas large as a hassock, and his preconceived idea of England asDickens's fat boy forever stuffing and going to sleep again, had tobe entirely revised. For if the English are proud of the way theyconceal the bitterness of their sorrow in this war, also they havea vast pride in the way they are sacrificing their creature comfortsfor it. In Latin countries there is more or less special privilege. But in England, the law is the law and men glory in its rigoursby obeying it in proud self-sacrifice. If our dinners sometimeswere Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, refreshing andfilling. We, however, had some trouble with our "Who's Who. " Oneevening they sat me opposite a handsome military man who talked ofairships and things most wonderfully and it took me three days tolearn that he was the authority on air fighting in Europe! He wasa Lord of somewhere, and Earl of something and a Duke of somewhat--allrolled into one. Henry hooted at me for two days. But finally hegave me some comfort. "At least, " he said, "you are as well-knownin London as your Duke's mixture is in Emporia, and London is abigger town!" Then it came Henry's turn. At our very grandest dinnerthey sat Henry between Lord Bryce and one of the most distinguishedmen of contemporary English letters. Henry shone that night as henever shone before and when Henry turns on his talk he is a wizard. Meredith Nicholson, who has heard Henry talk at a dinner, in arecent number of Scribner's magazine, said of him: "He's the besttalker I've ever heard. It was delightful to listen to discourse sofree, so graphic in its characterization, so coloured and flavouredwith the very soil, " and that night at the English dinner, allof Henry's cylinders were hitting and he took every grade withoutchanging gears. But my ears were eager for the man on Henry's right. He told some stories; my neck craned toward them. Henry returnedthe Scotch stories with Kansas stories and held the table. 

Then going home in the taxi Henry, recalling his dinner companion, said: "Bill, who was that little man on my left, that man theycalled Barrie!"

It seemed impossible. Yet those were Henry's very words. 

"Henry, Henry, have you never heard of 'Peter Pan, ' nor 'The LittleMinister, ' nor 'Sentimental'--" his friend's answer got no further. Henry's snort of shame almost stopped the taxi. 

"No, Bill--no--not that. Well, for Heaven's sake! and I sat by himall evening braying like a jack. Bill--Bill, you won't ever tellthis in Wichita, will you?"

So it must remain forever a secret!

That was a joyful hour for me, but the next day, Henry had hislaugh. We came in from tea and found a card on the table in thesnug little room near the elevator, which passes for a hotel officein London. The card was from Lord Bryce inviting us to tea thenext afternoon. It fell to Henry's lot to go out for the day inthe country, and to me to lunch with Granville Barker. So half-pastfour saw me rushing into the hotel from a taxi, which stood waitingoutside, and throbbing up a two-pence every minute. Then thisdialogue occurred. 

From me: "Is Mr. Allen in his room?"

From the hall boy: "He is, sir; shall I go for him, sir?"

From me: "If you will, please, and tell him I'm in an ungodly hurry, and we have a taxi at the door chewing up money like a cornsheller!"

The hall boy had to find someone to go on watch. Time was moving. The tea was at five. The Bryce apartment was a mile away, andthe chug of that taxi by the door moved me impulsively toward theelevator. But the elevator was still three steps away, when themanager of the hotel sauntered out from a side door, looked me overleisurely, and asked blandly:

"You'll be going to tea with Lord Bryce this afternoon--I presume!"

My hand was on the elevator button jabbing it fiercely, and mylips replied, "Yes--yes--say--Do you know whether Mr. Allen is inour room? It is getting late and he must hurry or--"

The manager continued to look me over still leisurely, then hesmiled persuasively, but spoke firmly; realizing that somethingwould have to be done for the good name of his hotel: "Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?" And while that taxi ground out two shillings, black shoes slowly but nervously enveloped two Emporia feet, whileHenry stood by and chortled in ghoulish Wichita glee!

But if we made a rather poor fist of our social diversions, atleast we had a splendid time at the London shows. And then therewas always the prospect of an exciting adventure getting home afterthe performance was over. The hotel generally found a taxi whichtook us to the theater. But once there we had to skirmish forourselves and London is a big town, and hundreds of thousands ofLondoners are hunting taxis at eleven at night, and they are hardto catch. So we generally had the fun of walking back to Brook Streetin the dark. And it is dark in London toward midnight. Paris ismerely gloomy. Rome is a bit somber, but London is as black as theinside of your hat. For London has been bombed and bombed by theGerman airmen, until London in the prevailing mist which threatensfog becomes mere murk. Night after night we wandered the crookedstreets inquiring our way of strangers, some of whom were worse lostthan we; one night we took a Londoner in charge and piloted him toLeicester Square; and then got lost ourselves finding Piccadillyand Regent Street! So that whenever we went out after dinner we werenever without dramatic excitement, even if it was not adequatelysupplied by the show. The London taste in shows seems to sheeraway from the war. In the autumn last past but two shows had awar motive: One "General Post, " a story of the fall of caste fromEnglish life during the war, telling how a tailor became a general;the other "The Better 'Ole, " a farce comedy, with a few musicalskits in it, staged entirely "at the front. " "The Better 'Ole"could be put on in any American town and the fun would raise theroof! There is no story to it; the show is but a series of dialoguesto illustrate Bairnsfather's cartoons. 

[Illustration: "Well now, Sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brownshoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?"]

A soldier comes splashing down the trench. His comrade cries, "Say, Alf, take yer muddy feet out o' the only water we got to sleep in. "Again a soldier squats shivering with fear in a shell hole, whilethe bombs are crashing over him, and dirt threatens to bury him. Acomrade looks in and to his captious remarks the squatting soldieranswers, "If you knows where there's a better 'ole, go to it!"Three men seated on a plum jam box during a terrific bombardment. Trees are falling, buildings crumbling, the landscape heaving, andBert says, "Alf--we'll miss this old war wen it's over!" As theshells strike nearer and nearer and a great crater yawns at theirfeet they crawl into it, are all but buried alive by the dirt fromanother shell, and Bert exclaims, "Say, Alf, scare me--I got the'iccoughs!" And so it goes for a whole evening, while Bert, makinglove to an interminable string of girls at each place where he isbilleted at the front, gives away scores of precious lockets withhis mother's hair in them, and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, tomake his cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of his wifeat home who keeps a "pub"!

The prohibitionist in America would probably insist that she keepa soda fountain or a woman's exchange; but no other alterationswould be needed to get the play over the footlights in any Englishspeaking town on the globe. 

The British soldiers crowd the house where "The Better 'Ole"is given, but their friends don't like it. The raw rollick of thegame with death, which is really Shakespearean in its directnessand its horse play--like the talk of the soldiers in "Henry IV" orthe chaffing of the grave-diggers in "Hamlet, " or the common peoplein any of Shakespeare's plays, offends the British home-stayingsense of propriety, and old ladies and gentlemen write to the Timesabout it. But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl theirapproval. 

Curiously enough in musical programs one finds no prejudice againstGerman music in London as one finds it in Paris. To get Beethovenin Paris one had to lower the windows, close the shutters, pull downthe shades and pin the curtains tight. At the symphony concerts inLondon one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wagner, who is almostmodern in his aggressive Teutonism. But the English have littlemusic of their own, and so long as they have to be borrowing theyseem to borrow impartially of all their neighbours, the French, the Slavs, the Germans, and the Italians. Indeed, even when Britishopinion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Symphony Orchestraput in an afternoon with Tschaicovsky's Fourth Symphony. And yetif, in a few months we could form even a vague notion of the publicminds of England, and of France, one might say that England seemedmore implacable than France. In France, where one heard no music butFrench and Italian music in the concerts, at the parks, in opera, one heard a serious discussion going on among school teachers aboutthe history to be taught after the war. 

Said one side: "Let's tell the truth about this war and its horrors. Let's tell of murdered women and children, of ravished homes, ofpillaged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down to their verymilestones! Let's tell how German rapacity for land began the war, and kept it up to its awful end. "

Says the other side: "Germany is our permanent neighbour. Ourchildren will have to live with Germany, and our children's childrento the end of time. War is a horrible thing. Hate breeds war. Whynot then let the story of this war and its barbarities die withthis generation? Why should we for ever breed hate into the heartof our people to grow eternally into war?"

England has no such questions in her mind. England will surely tellthe truth and defy the devil. But the Briton in matters of musicand the other arts is like 'Omer when he "smote 'is bloomin' lyre";the Briton also will go and take what he may require, without muchsentiment in the matter. 

But the things that roll off the laps of the gods, after humanityhas put its destinies there, sometimes are startlingly differentfrom the expected fruits of victory. We fight a war for one thing, win the war and get quite another thing. The great war now wagingbegan in a dispute over spheres of influence, market extensions, Places in the Sun and Heaven knows what of that sort of considerations. Great changes in these matters, of course, must come out of thewar. But boundaries and markets will fluctuate with the decadesand centuries. The important changes that will come out of thiswar--assuming that the Allies win it--will be found in the changedrelations of men. The changes will be social and economic and theywill be institutional and lasting. For generally speaking, suchchanges as approach a fair adjustment of the complaints of the "havenots" against the "haves" in life, are permanent changes. Kings, overlords, potentates, politicians, capitalists, high priests--mastersof various kinds--find it difficult to regain lost privileges andperquisites. And in this war Germany stands clearly for the "haves. "If Germany wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all overthe world. For the same autocracy in Berlin lives in Wall Street, and in the "city" in London, and in the caste and class interestsof Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany alone among the nationsof the earth rests on the divine right of kings that is the lastresort of privilege. In America we have the democratic weapons tobreak up our plutocracy whenever we desire to do so. In Englandthey are breaking up their caste and economic privileged classesrapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a motheaten relic. Andwhen junkerdom in Germany is crushed, then at least the world maybegin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself free. In thelands of the Allies the autocracy will be weakened by an alliedvictory. In Germany the junkers will be strong if they win thewar, and their strength will revive junkerism all over the earth. If the Allies win, it will weaken junkerdom everywhere. Germany, itis true, treats her working classes better than some of the Alliestreat their working people. But it is with the devilish wisdom ofa wise slaveholder, who sees profit in fat slaves. The workers getcertain legal bonuses. They have economic privileges, not democraticrights of free men under German rule. And the roaring of the bigguns out at the front, seemed to Henry and me to be the crashingwalls of privilege in the earth. 

Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one seesand hears in Europe may pass with the dawn of peace--woman, forinstance, may return indoors and come out only on election day, yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment havecome to stay. They are the most important salvage that will comeout of the wreck and waste of this war. In England, for instance, the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes. They providevirtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for womenover thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided formen. So revolutionary are the political changes in England thatafter the war, it is expected--conceded is hardly too strong aword, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalitioncabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet. Certainly if labour doesnot actually dominate the British government, labour will controlit indirectly. And the labour gains during the war will not belost. Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the alliedcountries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not bycompetitive rates. "The labour market" has passed with the slavemarket. Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, butupon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence. This change, of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order in theworld. And the labour party of England recently adopted a programwhich provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen, independent of the "labour market, " but also provides for thedemocratic control of industry: national railways, national mines, national electricity, national housing, and national land tenure. And as if that were not enough the demands of the labour partyinclude the permanent control of the prices of all the necessariesof life, without relation to profits and independent of supply anddemand. Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis. Labour demands that they be done permanently. And still further topress home its claims upon society, British labour demands a systemof taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bringtheir incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above thecommon level--a rise in some relation to the actual differences ofmind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a differencebased on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing. It is, ofcourse, revolution. But Labour now has political rights in England, and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in everypart of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and ratherdetermined, and probably will have its way. In France and in Italywhere for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlledassemblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the Englishare being made. 

And when the Allies win it will not be so much a change in geographythat shall mark off the world of the nineteenth century from theworld of the twentieth, as the fundamental social and economicchanges in society. The hungry guns out there at the front haveeaten away the whole social order that was!

For conditions in this war are new in the world. In every otherwar, soldiers have dreamed high dreams of their rewards. But theyhave not taken them--chiefly because their dreams were impractical, somewhat because the dreams that were practical were not held by amajority; or to some extent because if they were held by a majoritythe majority had no power. Now--even Henry admitted this is nomere theory--we have a new condition. In Europe for two decadesthe labour problem has been carefully thought out. Labour is in anumerical majority and the majority has political power and politicalpurpose. Labour has been asking and getting about the same thingsin every country. It has been asking and getting a broader politicalcontrol in order to assume a firmer economic control. But one daywe read in the London papers of an incident that indicated how farthe state control of industry has gone in England. A strike occurredand an important industry was threatened--not over wages, not overhours, not over shop conditions, but over the recognition of theunion. Pig-headed managing directors stood firm against recognizingthe unions. Then the government stepped in and settled the strikeand has compelled the owners of the plant to remove the managingdirector and to put in men satisfactory to the workers! Labour nowis beginning all over Europe to formulate a demand for a place inthe directorate of industries. This place in the directorate ofindustries is demanded that labour may have an intelligent knowledgeof the profits of a business so that labour honestly may share thoseprofits with capital. That this condition is coming in Europe noone will deny who sees the rush of events toward a redistributionof the profits of industry. 

Having the vision and having the power to get what it desires, only the will to use the power is needed. And that will is motivedby the great shadow that is hanging over the world--the shadow ofpublic debt in this war. Someone must pay that debt. Heretoforewar debts have fallen heaviest upon the poor. Those least able topay have paid the most. But those least able to pay are coming outof this war too smart for the old adjustment of the debt. Education, for the past fifty years has made a new man, who will refuse tobe over-taxed. During our visit to the front the soldiers wereforever saying to Henry and me: "We have offered our lives. Thosewho stayed at home must give up their riches. " And as we wentabout in England we were always hearing about the wisdom of a heavyconfiscatory tax. Among the conservatives themselves who presumablyhave a rather large share of the national wealth, there is aserious feeling that immediately after the war a tax-measure shouldbe passed which would at once confiscate a certain portion of theproperty of the country--one hears different per cents discussed;some declare that ten per cent is enough, while others hold that itwill require 25 per cent. This confiscatory tax is to be collectedwhen any piece of property changes hands, and the accruing sumis to be used for paying off the national debt, or a considerableportion of it at once. The situation is completely changed from thatwhich followed the Napoleonic wars, where war taxes fell largelyupon labour. So in self-preservation, capital is consideringturning over a part of its property to the state to avoid the slowand disintegrating grind that otherwise inevitably must come. 

A curious side light on the way in which democracy is conductingthis war is found in the way by which it finances the war. The greatdebt of the war, piled up mountain high, is of course, convertedinto bonds. These bonds, similar to our Liberty Bonds, have beenpurchased not exclusively by the bankers as in former wars, butby the people of the middle class and of the labouring class. Thusdemocracy has its savings in war bonds, which would be wiped out byan indemnity to Germany, but would be greatly inflated by an Alliedvictory; and where the treasure is, there the heart is! Perhaps itwas political strategy which placed the war bonds in the hands ofthe people. But more than likely it was financial necessity. Forthe tremendous financial burden of this war was too great for theinvesting classes to bear unaided. So even the financing of the warhas been more or less democratized. In fact, the whole conduct ofthe war is democratized. 

One of the corroborating proofs that this is after all not a king'swar, but a people's war, is found in the kind of stories theywere forever telling Henry and me about the war. They are not herostories. Mostly they are funny stories, more or less gently guyingthe "pomp and circumstance of glorious war, " for it is the proudboast of the British army that this is a noncoms' war. Doubtlessthe stories have small basis in fact, but the currency of theseblithe stories reflects the popular mind. Thus they say that whenGeneral Haig and his staff came down to review the Canadian troopsand pin a carload of hardware on their men for bravery in battle, medals of one sort and another, the Canadian General lined hishuskies up, and as the staff approached he cried anxiously, "Say, boys--here he comes. Now see if you can't stand to attention, andfor Heaven's sake, fellows, don't call me Bill while he is here!"And then they say that after the heavy hardware and shelf goodswere distributed a British officer lifted his voice to say: "Men, you have written a brave page upon our history. No more splendidcourage than yours ever has been known in the annals of our proudrace. But with such magnificent courage, why can you not displayother soldierly qualities. Why are you so loose in your discipline?Why don't you treat your officers with more respect?" And in thepause a voice from the ranks replied, "They're not a bad lot, sir. We like 'em all right. But we have 'em along for mascots!"

The French also seem to have their easy-going ways. For currentsmoking room fiction relates that last spring after a troop ofFrench soldiers had been hauled out to be shot for refusing to gointo battle under orders, a whole division revolted and demandednew officers--and got new officers--before they would move forward. And the same smoking room fiction says that in the revolt the menwere right and the officers wrong. 

"Why, " asked a new English officer of some Russian troops who hadmade a splendid assault on a German position in the spring of 1917, an assault that required high courage and great soldierly skill, "why did you men all lift up your hands just before the charge wasmade?" The noncom grinned and answered, "We were taking a vote uponthe matter of the charge, sir!"

In a theater on the boulevards in Paris recently a hit was madeby introducing a stage scene showing the princes and nobility inpoverty, looking down from a gallery at the top of the theater, onthe rich working people in the boxes below; the princes and nobilitywere singing a doleful ditty and dancing a sad dance about thechanged circumstances that were glooming up the world. 

Simultaneously across the channel in England, they were telling thisone. Lord Milner, who in Germany would be one of the All Highestof the High Command, was calling at an English house where thechildren were not used to nobility. They heard their father referto Lord Milner as "my lord. " And one child edged up to him inawe and asked, "O sir, were you indeed born in a manger?" The AllHighest smiled and quoth in reply, "No, my child, no, I was not bornin a manger, but if they keep on taxing me, I fear I shall die inone!"

The Italians have high hopes of harnessing their nine millions ofhorsepower in Alpine water-falls, running their state-owned railroadsand public utilities with it, and introducing electricity asan industrial power into Italian homes, thus bringing back to thehomes of the people the home industries like weaving which steamtook away a century ago. But this is only a dream. Yet sometimesdreams do come true. And dreams are wishes unexpressed; and in thisclay of democratic power, a wish with a ballot behind it becomesa will, and soon hardens into a fact. The times are changing. Butof course human nature remains much the same. Men under a givenenvironment will do about the same kind of things under one set ofcircumstances. But we should not forget in our computations thatlaws, customs, traditions, the distribution of wealth, make anentirely new environment, and that circumstances are not the samewhen environment differs. That the surroundings of those people knowncollectively as "the poor" have changed, and changed permanentlyby the war, no one who sees them in Europe can doubt. They arewell-fed, well-housed, and are determined to be well-educated. They know that they can use their ballots to get their share ofthe wealth they produce. They are never going to be content againwith crusts. They are motived now by hope rather than by fear, andthey are going to react strangely during the next ten years on thesocial structure of this old world. But even the new majority willnot change everything of course. Grass will grow, water will rundown hill, smart men will lead fools, wise men will have the placesof honour and power, in proportion to the practicality of theirwisdom. But for all that, we shall have in a rather large andcertainly in a keenly interesting degree a new heaven and a newearth. 

Now as these speculations upon the new order came to us as our journeydrew to its close in England, the war seemed slowly to change itsmeaning. It became something more than a conflict; it seemed to bea revolution--world-wide, and all encompassing. Then we thought of"the front" in new terms. 

We realized that behind the curtain in Germany, a despotic will, scientifically guided, is controlling the food, the munitions, the assembling of men and materials for this war. But on this sideof the German curtain at the "front" which we knew, a democraticpurpose is doing these things. The view of that democratic purposeat work, to me at least, was my chief trophy of the war. The lawswhich make food conservation possible, which direct shipping, mobilize railroads, control industry, regulate wages, prescribemany of the habits of life to fit the war, all rise out of theexperience of the people. There is a vast amount of the "consentof the governed" in this whole war game, so far as the Allies areconcerned. And as it is in democratic finance, so also is it inthe taste and talent and capacity for war. That also is democratic. What a wide range of human activity is massed in this business ofwar!

For days and days after we left the continent, in our minds we couldsee armies moving into the trenches somewhere along the "far flungbattle line, " and other armies moving out. The picture haunted us. It seemed to me a cinematograph of democracy. For the change of anarmy division from the trenches, tired, worn and bedraggled, movingwearily to its station of rest, with another army division, freshand eager, moving up from its station of rest to the front, is indeeda social miracle. It is a fine bit of human machinery. So in termsof our modern democracy it may be well to review the interminablepanorama of this democratic war. Fifty years ago it would have beena memorable achievement. Waterloo itself was not such a miracle. Yetsomewhere in this war, this wonder is done every day and no recordis made of it. Imagine hundreds of miles of wide, white roads, hard-surfaced and graded for the war, leading to a sector ofthe line. To make and keep these roads, itself is a master's job. Imagine the roads filled all day with two long lines of trucks, passing and repassing; one line carrying its guns and camp outfit, its whole paraphernalia of war, going to the battle front in thehills; another never-ceasing procession with its martial impedimentacoming out of the hills to rest. A few horses hauling big guncarriages straggle through the dust. Here and there, but rarely, is a group of marching men--generally men singing as they march. Occasionally a troop of German prisoners marching with the goosestep, comes swinging along carrying their shovels at a martialangle--road menders--which proves that we are more than thirtykilos from the firing line; now and then a camp-kitchen rattlespast. But ever in one's ears is the rich rumble of trucks, recallingthe voluptuous sound of the circus wagon on the village street. But always there are two great circus parades, one going up, onecoming down. Lumbering trucks larger than city house-moving vanswhirl by in dust clouds; long--interminably long--lines of thesetrucks creak, groan and rumble by. Some of the trucks are mysteriouslynon-committal as to their contents--again reproducing the impressionof the circus parade. Probably they hide nothing more terriblethan tents or portable ice plants. But most of the trucks that gogrowling up and come snarling down the great white roads, bear men;singing men, sleeping men, cheering men, unshaved men, natty men, eating men, smoking men, old men and young men, but always cheerfulmen--private soldiers hurrying about the business of war; to theirtrenches or from their trenches, but always cheerful. Sometimesa staff officer's car, properly caparisoned, shuttles through theline like a flashing needle; sometimes a car full of young officersof the line tries to nose ahead of the men of the regiment, butrather meekly do these youngsters try to sneak their advantage, as one swiping an apple; no great special privilege is theirs. Interminable lines of truck-mounted guns rattle along, each greatgun festively named, as for instance, "The Siren, " or "Baby" or"The Peach" or "The Cooing Dove. " Curious snaky looking objectsall covered with wiggly camouflage--some artist's pride--are theseguns, and back of them or in front of them and around them, clankhuge empty ammunition wagons going out, or heavy ones coming in. Atshort intervals along the road are repair furnaces, and near thema truck or a gun carriage, or an ambulance that has turned out forslight repairs. In the village are great stores of gasoline andrubber, huge quantities of it assembled by some magic for the hour'surgent need. 

What a marvel of organization it is; no confusion, no distraughtmen, no human voice raised except in ribald song. From the ends ofthe earth have come all these men, all these munitions, all thisfood and tents and iron and steel and rubber and gas and oil. Andthere it centers for the hour of its need on this one small sectorof the front; indeed on every small sector of the long, long trail, these impedimenta of war come hurrying to their deadly work. Andit is not one man; not one nation even, not one race, nor even onerace kindred that is assembling this endless caravan of war. Itis a spirit that is calling from the vasty deep of this world'streasure, unto material things to rise, take shape and gather atthis tryst with death. It is the spirit of democracy calling acrossthe world. The supreme councils of the Allies--what are they? Theychange, form and reform. Generals, field marshals, staff officersin gold lace, cabinets, presidents, puppet kings, and God knowswhat of those who strut for a little time in their pomp of place andpower--what are they but points on the drill of the great machinewhose power is the people of the world, struggling in protestagainst despotism, privilege, autocracy and the pretence of the fewto play greedily at the master game. The points break off, or areworn off--what difference does it make? Joffre, French, Cardona, Neville, Asquith, Painleve, Kitchener, Haig--the drill neverceases; the power behind it never falters. For once in the worldthe spirit of democracy is organized; organized across lines ofrace, of language, of national boundary! A score of million men, inarms, a score of billions of people--workers, captains of industry, local leaders, little governors and commercial princelets, bosses, farmers, bankers, skilled labourers, and men and women of fumblinghands and slow brains, teachers, preachers, philosophers, poets, thieves, harlots, saints and sinners--all the free people of theworld, giving what talents Heaven has bestowed upon them to make thepower of this great machine that moves so smoothly, so resistlessly, so beautifully along the white ribbons of roads up to the battle. 

When the battle ceases, of course, that organization will depart. But always democracy will know that it can organize, that it canrise to a divine dignity of courage and sacrifice. And that knowledgeis the great salvage of this war. More than written laws, morethan justice established, more than wrongs righted in any nation, and in all the nations will be the knowledge of this latent powerof men!

CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH WE RETURN TO "THE LAND OF THE FREE"

We found when we were leaving England another of those curiouscontrasts between the nations of the earth that one meets in a longjourney. Coming into Bordeaux we were convoyed for three hours bya ratty little French destroyer and a big dirigible French balloon. Leaving Liverpool, we lay two nights and a day sealed in the harbour, and then sailed out with the Arabic, the Mongolian, the Victorian, and two freighters, amid a whole flock of cruisers and destroyers. The protecting fleet stayed with us two nights and three days. On the French boat the barber practically had no news of suddendeaths and hairbreadth escapes which had happened while we slept. We sailed into the Gironde River peacefully, almost joyously. Butwe left the Mersey with a story that a big fleet of destroyershovered at the river's mouth; that the Belgic had been beachedout there on a shoal by a "sub, " and that we would be lucky if ourthroats were not cut in the water as we tried to swim ashore afterwe had been blown out of our boats. 

The French certainly are more casual than the English. But then, the Germans have sunk virtually no French liners, while the Britishliner is the favourite food of von Tirpetz! They even showed ushis teeth marks on our American liner, the New York. On an earliertrip during the summer of 1917 the boat had been torpedoed whenAdmiral Sims was a passenger, going to England. The Admiral wassitting at dinner when the explosion occurred and the force of itthrew him to the high ceiling of the dining saloon! At least that'swhat they told us. Caution and conflicting doubts, "fears withinand foes without, " were not so unreasonable as one might fancy, coming out of any British port. 

But to Henry and me the greatest contrast came, not in the conductof the ship's officers, as compared with the French seamen, but inthe ship's company, going to war and coming away from it. We wentwith youth; the Espagne was crowded with young men going to war, with young women going out to serve those who were salvaging thewaste of war. The boat carried a score of lovers--some married, someimpromptu, some incidental and fleeting, but all vastly interesting. For when the new wine blooms the old ferments, and stumbling overthe dark decks at night on the Espagne, we were forever runninginto youth paired off and gazing at the mystery of the ocean andthe stars. So the corks were always popping in our old hearts; andwe enjoyed it. But we paced the black night decks of the New Yorkas "one who treads alone a banquet hall deserted. " We were amongthe younger people on the ship. There was no youth to play withunder thirty! No one touched the piano. No one lifted his voicein song. The most devilish thing going as we sailed was a game ofchess! There was a night game of whist or cribbage or some othersedentary game, which closed at ten, and after that in the librarythe talk sagged and died like a decomposed chord in a Tschaikovskysymphony! It was sad! One had to go to the smoking room where therewas wassail on lemon squash and insipid English beer until aftermidnight. But there the talk was good. Of course it sometimesbore a strong smell of man about it, but it was virile and wise. Arug dealer from Odessa, a dealer in mining machinery from Moscow, a Chicago college professer returning from Petrograd, a cigarettemaker from Egypt, a brace of British naval officers going over toreturn with Canadian transports, an American aerial engineer, backfrom an inspection trip to France, a great English actor, who onceplayed Romeo with Mary Andersen--to give one an approximate of hisage--a Red Cross commission from Italy, and an Australian premier. The whole ship's company was but thirty-four first class and ofthese but six were women. It was no place for dashing young bladesin their late forties like Henry and me. 

As the hour for leaving the ship approached, the press of thesplendid months behind us drew Henry and me together more and more. We were hanging over the deck rail looking at a faint attempt ata cloudy sunset at the end of our last day out. We fell to talkingof the love affairs on the Espagne, and perhaps from me came somewords about the Eager Soul, the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor. Henry looked up dazed and anxious. Clearly he did not know what itwas all about. 

"Who was this Gilded Youth?" asked Henry. 

"He was the dream we dreamed when we were boys, Henry. When fate setyou out as a book agent on the highway and me to kicking a Peerlessjob press in a dingy printing office. The Gilded Youth was all wewould fain have been!"

"And the Eager Soul?" quoth he. 

"She, dearly beloved, was the ideal of our boyish hearts. Didyou ever have a red-headed sweetheart in those olden golden days, Henry?" He shook a sad head in retrospection. "Nor did one evercome to me. But most boys want one sometime, so I took her offthe Red Cross Posters and breathed the breath of life into her. Andisn't she a peach; and doesn't she kind of warm your heart and makeup for the hardship of your youth?" He smiled assent and asked:"But the young Doctor, Bill, surely he--"

"He is the American spirit in France, Henry--badly scared, veryshy at heart, full of hope and dying to serve!"

"And it never happened--any of it?" asked Henry. 

"Yes, oh, yes, Henry. There was the tall boy who played Saint Saenson the Espagne, and did the funny stunt at the auction; there wasthe night we sat on the food box near the front at Douaumont andheard the ambulance boy whistling the bit from "Thais, " far up thehill in the misty moonlight; there was the French soldier by thesplintered tree in the Forest of Hess; there was the head nursekilled by the abri between Souilly and Verdun, who waited whileher girls went in; there was the poor dying boy in the hospitalfor whom you bought the flowers and there was the handsome NewYork woman coming over to start her hospital. There was the youngdoctor whom the German officer prisoner tried to kill. And therewas the picture of the red-headed Red Cross nurse, and there wereour dreams. "

"And the ending--will you have a happy ending?" demanded Henry. 

"Aren't the visions of the young men, and the dreams of the oldalways happy? It is in passing through life from one to the otherthat our courage fails and our hearts sadden. And these phantomsare of such stuff as dreams are made of and they may not falteror grow weary, or grow old. Youth always has a happy ending--evenin death. It is when youth ends in life that we may question itshappiness. "

And so we left our fancies and walked to the big guns far forwardand gazed into the sunset, where home lay, home, and the thingsthat were real, and dear, and worth while. 

THE END

APPENDIX A

 A Soldier's Song

 [Musical notation]

 Love, though these hands that rest in thine so Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but

 dear, Back in-to dust, may crum-ble this, Love, though our faith must be our

 with-the year; Love, though these lips, that rar-est bliss; Love, though the years may

 [Musical notation]

 meet thy lips, so true, Soon may be bring their death and chill; Love, though our

 grass that stores the morn-ing dew blood must lose its pass-ion, still, O Love, Know well, that this fond heart of mine, Still, Love, Know well, that this heart is di-vine, It shall be al-ways, al-ways, al-ways thine! It shall be al-ways, al-ways, al-ways thine!