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by William Allen White

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Title: The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

Author: William Allen White

Release Date: May, 2004  [EBook #5633]
[This file was first posted on January 17, 2004]
[Most recently updated: January 17, 2004]

Edition: 11

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME ***




Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










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 be
worn 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 about
it!"

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 force
of will and both hands!

He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for
a 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 Oklahoma
City 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 the
train 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 to
another man's story in his own mouth

A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform without
looking like a sack of meal

He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coat
of 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 party
and dropped into a grand ball

"Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord
Bryce'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 introduced
in the first line. But really there isn't so much to say about
Henry--Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas--Henry J. Allen,
editor and owner of the Wichita Beacon. And to make the dramatis
personae complete, we may consider me as the editor of the Emporia
Gazette, and the two of us as short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inland
Americans, from fresh water colleges in our youth and arrived at
New York by way of an often devious, yet altogether happy route,
leading through politics where it was rough going and unprofitable
for years; through business where we still find it easy to sign,
possible to float and hard to pay a ninety-day note, and through
two country towns; one somewhat less than one hundred thousand
population, and Emporia slightly above ten thousand.

We are discovered in the prologue to the play in New York City wearing
our 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 Wichita
or Emporia; silk suits are bought by Wichita people and Emporians
all 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 a
view to publicity later, one to speak for the Red Cross, the other
to write for it in America. We have been told by the Red Cross
authorities in Washington that we shall go immediately to the front
in France and that it will be necessary to have the protective
colouring of some kind of an army uniform. The curtain rises on a
store 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 trying
to sell us a khaki coat, and shirt and trousers for $17.48. And
at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be worn
at most only two months. But we compromise by making him throw in
another shirt and a service hat and we take the lot for $17.93 and
go away holding in low esteem the "pride, pomp and circumstance of
glorious war" as exemplified by these military duds. In our hearts
as we go off at R. U. E. will be seen a hatred for uniforms as
such, and particularly for phoney uniforms that mean nothing and
cost $18.00 in particular.

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

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

The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and scooting through the
night, with two or three hundred others of the cast of characters
aboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters,
and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity of
evil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act,
splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for three
thousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicas
of Wichita and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and the man
that this story is written, nor of Henry and me, and the war; but
it is the eternal Wichita and Emporia in the American heart that
we 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 have
just come to town and the other half is just ready to leave town)
may not understand this story. For in some respects New York is
larger than Wichita and Emporia; but not so much larger; for mere
numbers of population amount to little. There is always an angle of
the particular from which one can see it as a part of the universal;
and seen properly the finite is always infinite. And that brings
us back naturally to Henry and me, looking out at the scurrying
stars in the ocean as we hurried through the black night on the
good ship Espagne. We had just folded away a fine Sunday dinner, a
French Sunday dinner, beginning with onion soup which was strange;
and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blast
of trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup
was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner that
night ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboard
the boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the value
of food as a two-way commodity--going down and coming up--but
later in the dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one-way
luxury, with small thought as to its other uses. So we leaned against
the rail in the night and thought large thoughts about Wichita and
Emporia.

Here we were, two middle-aged men, nearing fifty years, going out
to a ruthless war without our wives. We had packed our own valises
at the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. We realized
that probably we were leaving half our things in closets and
drawers and were taking the wrong things with us, and checking the
right things in our trunks at our hotels in New York. We had some
discussion about our evening clothes, and on a toss-up had decided
to take our tails and leave our dinner coats in the trunks. But
we didn't know why we had abandoned our dinner coats. We had no
accurate social knowledge of those things. Henry boasted that his
wife had taught him a formula that would work in the matter of white
or black ties with evening clothes. But it was all complicated with
white vests and black vests and sounded like a corn remedy; yet it
was the only sartorial foundation we had. And there we were with
land out of sight, without a light visible on the boat, standing
in the black of night leaning over the rail, looking at the stars
in the water, and wondering silently whether we had packed our best
cuff buttons, "with which to harry our foes," or whether we might
have to win the war in our $17.93 uniforms, and we both thought
and admitted our shame, that our wives would think we had "been
extravagant in putting so much money into those uniforms. The admirable
French dinner which we had just enveloped, seemed a thousand miles
away. It was a sad moment and our thoughts turned naturally to
home.

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

"And mashed potatoes, and lots of thick cream gravy!" came from
the 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," welled
up from Henry's heavy heart. It was a critical moment. If it had
kept on that way we would have got off the boat, and trudged back
home 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 divine
right of kings out of Germany and the kaiser on to the Chautauqua
circuit, reciting his wrongs and his reminiscences!

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

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

How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn days
when the man who went to France was a hero in his town's eyes.
Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passed
down America's main streets, all headed for France. And what proud
pageants they were! Walking at the head of the line were the little
limping handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came the
middle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so
boyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--the
volunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half
accoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly
young. There had been banquets the week before, and speeches and
flag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tears
and good-byes across the land. And all this in a few weeks; indeed
it began during the long days in which we two sailed through the
gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such
a bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town upon
an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred
leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger in
some way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers
often multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and me
on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and
ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers. No particular advantage
would come to the German arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne,
carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on merciful
errands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon,
we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an interned
leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had been told of how cunningly the
Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric
wires 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 and
rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they had
scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make
steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a
floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize
she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those
handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country
as they went to their training camps. Even to consider these things
gave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat
in the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had
come 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 the
decks as dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots an
hour. In peace times it would be regarded as a crazy man's deed,
to go whizzing along at full speed without lights. Henry had taken
two long puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind us came
a hand that tapped his shoulder, and then a voice spoke:

"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A submarine could see that
five 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 bit
nearer to us than ever. Scores of good people who had come on the
boat in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day;
mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. or American ambulance or Field Service
uniforms. We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed that
we should at least have a dress rehearsal. The only regular uniforms
on board were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, straggling
home from a French political mission to America, and these French
soldiers were the only passengers on the boat who had errands
to France connected with the destructive side of the war. So not
until the uniforms blazed out gorgeously did we realize what an
elaborate and important business had sprung up in the reconstructive
side of war. Here we saw a whole ship's company--hundreds of busy
and successful men and women, one of scores and scores of ship's
companies like it, that had been hurrying across the ocean every
few days for three years, devoted not to trading upon the war, not
to exploiting the war, not even to expediting the business of "the
gentle art of murdering," but devoted to saving the waste of war!

As the days passed, and "we sailed and we sailed," a sort of
denatured pirate craft armed to the teeth with healing lotions to
massage 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 ocean
bothered him. He understood a desert or a drouth, but here was a
tremendous amount of unnecessary and unaccountable water. It was
a calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at it for a long
time one day, Henry remarked wearily: "The town boosters who secured
this ocean for this part of the country rather overdid the job!"

One evening, looking back at the level floor of the ocean stretching
illimitably into the golden sunset, he mused: "They have a fine
country here. You kind of like the lay of it, and there is plenty
of nice sightly real estate about--it's a gently rolling country,
uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there's
got to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that at
a 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 step
out as individuals from the mass. With us it was the Red Cross
stenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased being
ladyships 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 intensely
interested in exploring each other's lives. It is after all the
most wonderful game in the world. And while the chaperon fluttered
about more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks at
night, and while public opinion on the boat made eminently proper
rules against young women in the smoking room, still young blood did
have 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 token
of 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 and
not altogether blind to a pretty face--and yet the oldest people
on 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 game
in the world worth playing and that the gains of youth, service and
success 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 like
that; for we called her the Eager Soul. And she was a pretty girl,
too--American pretty: Red hair--lots of blowy, crinkly red hair
that was always threatening to souse her face and ears; blue eyes
of the serious kind and a colour that gave us the impression that
she did exercises and could jab a punching bag. Indeed before we
met her, we began betting on the number of hours it would take her
to tell us that she took a cold plunge every morning. Henry expected
the statement on the second day; as a matter of fact it came late
on the first day! She was that kind. But there was no foolishness
about her. She was a nurse--a Red Cross nurse, and she made it
clear that she had no illusions about men; we suspected that she
had seen them cut up and knew their innermost secrets! Nevertheless
she was tremendously interesting, and because she, too, was from
the middle west, and possibly because she realized that we accepted
her for what she was, she often paced the rounds of the deck between
us. We teased her more or less about a young doctor of the Johns
Hopkins unit who sometimes hovered over her deck chair and a certain
Gilded Youth--every boat-load has its Gilded Youth--whose father
was president of so many industrial concerns, and the vice-president
of so many banks and trust companies that it was hard to look at
the boy without blinking at his gilding. Henry was betting on the
Gilded Youth; so the young doctor fell to me. For the first three
or four days during which we kept fairly close tab on their time,
the Doctor had the Gilded Youth beaten two hours to one. Henry
bought enough lemonade for me and smoking room swill of one sort
and another to start his little old Wichita ocean But it was plain
that the Gilded Youth interested her. And in a confidential moment
filled with laughter and chaff and chatter she told us why: "He's
patronizing me. I mean he doesn't know it, and he thinks I don't
know it; but that's what he's doing. I interest him as a social
specimen. I mean--I'm a bug and he likes to take me up and examine
me. I think I'm the first 'Co-ed' he ever has seen; the first
girl who voted and didn't let her skirts sag and still loved good
candy! I mean that when he found in one half hour that I knew he wore
nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearly
expired; he was that puzzled! I'm not quite the type of working
girl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but--I mean I think he is
wondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind! When he
decides," she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking
away her overflowing red hair, "I may have to slap him--I mean
don't you know--"

And we did know. And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizing
me with odds on the Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautiful
boy--tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming. He
played Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano in
the women's lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud poker
with the San Francisco boys in the smoking room. And it was clear
that he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat
higher 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 France
down near the Joan of Arc country. He told us shyly one day, as we
watched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationed
at an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, "I serve
because I am served!" When he did not repeat the motto we knew that
it had caught him. He had been at home working on a germ problem
connected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence of
Mrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficulties
with the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the two
at their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge and
gasped, "My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a jumped off the
boat!"

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

As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar faces
and figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair of
eyes--a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. Speaking broadly
and allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes were
no treat to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes. Henry
said if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captain
should make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. We
were not always sure she was a Princess. At times she seemed more
like a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes. We never
had 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--were
too many for us. And we fell to speculating upon exactly what would
happen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporia
if the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's place
at table was where he got the full voltage of the eyes every time
the Princess switched them on. And whenever he reached for the
water and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behind
his ordinary resisting power. And he drank enough to float a ship!
As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonely
hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes and
we concluded that they were Latin--Latin chiefly engaged in the
business of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wives
and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and
had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their
husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast,
and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of
their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these
female eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decided
to investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid off
from our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Our
closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably
was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her
when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing
her eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for
ever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have been
the hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deck
with the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes. He
was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of
the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score
on 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 at
home--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and
the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These things
left her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered,
slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on
her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim
lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she was
at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. She
managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan
the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansas
partner suggested that life would be broader and better for women
after the war, because they would have so much more important a
part 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 do
when we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllables
of petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you know
women were made to be pet-ted." There was a bewildered second under
the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered
seriously her theory. He had never cherished such a theory before.
But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the
pleasant new things in it--this theory of the woman requiring to
be pet-ted!

Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said: "Oh, yes--come
on, Col-o-nel"--making three unaccented syllables of the word--"and
we shall have une femme sandweech." She gave the Colonel her arm.
The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy with
the Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia Country
Club, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes
to the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyous
incandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchman
but gazing sweetly at the American, "Col-o-nel, will you please
carry my books?" They must have weighed six or eight ounces! And
she 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 detail
and drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporia
type, the American type that carries its own books and burdens and
does not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry and
does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may die
for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing that
they should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others.
But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry
and me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the
Armenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerage
and all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the
drill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army
and avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling,
they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It was
queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. It
was written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and broken
time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had the
charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the
strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.

"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy in
khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano.
"That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that's
the 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax and he went away
whistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with their
idea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music,
the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins
from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their
striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across
the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its
essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each
cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind.
And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love
one's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind
of humour, one's own kind of philosophy; knowing that they are not
perfect and understanding their limitations; trusting to time and
circumstance to bring out the fast colours of life in the eternal
wash. Thinking thoughts like these that night, Henry's bunk-mate
could not sleep. So he slipped on a grey overcoat over his pajamas
and put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, and went out on
deck 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 he
paced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt spectre in the night.
The deck chairs were filled with sleepers from the berths below
decks. At last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped to gaze
over the rail at the water and the stars when he heard this from
a deck chair behind him, "Wake up, Net--for God's sake wake up!"
whispered a frightened woman's voice. "There's that awful thing
again that scared me so awhile ago!"

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

Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean interested us. An
ocean always seems so unreasonable to inlanders. And that morning
when there was "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn
breaking," Henry came alongside and looked at the seascape, all
twisting and writhing and tossing and billowing, up and down and
sideways. He also looked at his partner who was gradually growing
pale 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 been
rain somewhere up near the headwaters or else the fellow took his
finger out of the hole in the dyke. Anyway, she'll be out of her
banks before breakfast. I don't want any breakfast; I'm going to
bed for the day." And he went.

During the day Henry brought the cheerful information that the Doctor
was down and that the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearing
out the deck. Henry also added that her slapping was scheduled for
that night.

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

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

A sense of security comes to one who churns along seven days on
a calm sea on an eventless voyage. And the French, by easy-going
ways, stimulate that sense of security; we had heard weird stories
of boat-drills at daybreak, of midnight alarms and of passengers
sleeping on deck in their life preservers, and we were prepared
for the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have. They
never came. One afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had notice
at noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon.
The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and at
three o'clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned
to him, donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffed
appearance, answered to a roll-call, guyed those about him after
the manner of old friends, and waited for something else. It never
came. The ship's officers gradually faded from the decks and the
passengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared
one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their
life-belts moulted! That was the last we heard of the boat-drill
or the life-belts. The French are just that casual.

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

Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for his
moral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke
out 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 to
think if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run a
U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I've been trying to
imagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or down
at the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captain
of a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinking
ship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to figure
out how the fellows sitting around him would take it. They'd get
up and leave. He would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag or
bluff or blare of victory would gloss over his act. We simply don't
think the German way. We have a loyalty to humanity deeper than
our patriotism. There are certain things self-respecting men can't
do and live in Wichita. But there seem to be no restrictions in
Germany. The U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lure
probably holds about such a place in his home town as Charley Carey,
our banker, or Walter Innes, our dry goods man. He is doubtless
a leading citizen of some German town; doubtless a kind father, a
good husband and maybe a pillar of the church. And I suppose town
and home and church will applaud him when he goes back to Germany
to brag about his treachery. In Wichita, town and home and church
would be ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if they came back
to brag about killing men who were lured to death by responding to
the call of distress."

And so, having disposed of the psychology of the enemy, we turned
in for the night. We were entering the danger zone and the night was
hot. A few passengers slept on deck; but most of the ship's company
went to their cabins. We didn't seem to be afraid. We presumed
that our convoy would appear in the morning. But when it failed
to appear we assumed that there was no danger. No large French
passenger boat had been sunk by the Germans; this fact we heard a
dozen times that day. It soothed us. The day passed without bringing
our convoy. Again we went to bed, realizing rather clearly that
the French do take things casually; and believing firmly that the
convoys would come with the dawn. But dawn came and brought no
convoy. We seemed to be nearing land. The horizon was rarely without
a 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 the
deck; not uneasily, not in fear, understand, but just to be on
deck, looking landward. And then at two o'clock it appeared. Far
off in the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. It looked
like a seabird; but it grew. In ten minutes the whole deck was
excited. Every glass was focused on the growing black spot. And
then it loomed up the size of a baseball; it showed colour, a dull
yellow in the distance and then it swelled and took form and glowed
brighter and came rushing toward us, as large as a moon, as large
as a barrel, and then we saw its outlines, and it came swooping
over us, a great beautiful golden thing and the whole deck burst
into cheers. It was our convoy, a dirigible balloon--vivid golden
yellow, trimmed with blue! How fair it seemed. How graceful and how
surely and how powerfully it circled about the ship like a great
hovering bird, and how safe we felt; and as we cheered and cheered
the swirling, glowing, beautiful thing, we knew how badly frightened
we really had been. With danger gone, the tension lifted and we
read the fear in our hearts. A torpedo boat destroyer came lumbering
across the sky line. It also was to convoy us, but it had a most
undramatic entrance; and besides we had sighted land. The deck cheered
easily, so we cheered the land. And everyone ran about exclaiming
to everyone else about the wonder and splendour of the balloon,
and everyone took pictures of everyone else and promised to send
prints, and the land waxed fat and loomed large and hospitable
while Henry paced the deck with his hands clasped reflectively
behind him. He was deeply moved and language didn't satisfy him
much. Finally he took his fellow Kansan by the arm and pointed to
the magnificence of the hovering spectre in yellow and blue that
circled about the ship:

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

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

We landed after dark. Every one was going about vowing deathless
friendship to every one else, and so far as the stenographers and
the ambulance boys were concerned, it came to Henry and me that we
meant it; for they were a fine lot, just joyous, honest, brave young
Americans going out to do their little part in a big enterprise.
While we were bidding good-bye to our boys and girls, we kept
a weather eye on the Eager Soul. She had hooked the Gilded Youth
fairly deeply. He saw that her trunk came up from the hold, but we
noticed that while he was gone, the Doctor showed up and went with
her to sort out her hand-baggage from the pile on the deck. The
gang plank was let down under a pair of smoky torches. And the
Gilded Youth had paid a fine tip some place to be permitted to be
the first passenger off the boat that he might get one of the two
taxis in sight for the Eager Soul. She followed him, but she made
him let the Doctor come along. And so the drinks--lemon squash and
buttermilk--were equally on Henry and me. We hurried down the gang
plank after the happy trio. They were young--so infinitely and
ineffably young, it seemed to us. And the girl's face was flushed
and joyous, and her hair--why it didn't shake out and drown her we
never knew; certainly it surged out from under her hat like ripples
of youth incarnate. We saw them stacking their valises in the taxi
and over the taxi and around the taxi and the last we saw of her
was 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 French
language rising to our ears as we teetered unsteadily into it.

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

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




CHAPTER II

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


Bordeaux is the "Somewhere in France" from which cablegrams from
passengers on the French liners usually are sent. This will be no
news to the Germans, nor to Americans who read the advertisements
of the French liners, but it may be news to Americans who receive
the mysterious cablegrams "from a French port," after their friends
have landed. It is a dear old town, mouldy, and weather-beaten,
and mediaeval, this Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along the
street's over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneaking
mischievously out of bounds. A woe-begone trolley creaks through the
narrow streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over the mistakes
of misspent lives, larrup disconsolate horses over stony streets
as they creak and jog and wheeze ahead of the invisible crows
that seem always to be hovering above ready to batten upon their
rightful provender. For an hour in the morning before our train left
for Paris we chartered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town and
took in Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita,
or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as that
goes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide and
beautiful world. "All this needs," said Henry, as he lolled back
upon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims
on 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 good
film!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group
of firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chess
or something. But the town had an historic interest for us as the
home of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked up
their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate
idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we
thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we
could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band
wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew;
indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own
politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what
seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered
heads for a second before we took the train for Paris.

All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France
we were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat and
smiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris,
and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thing
which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American
landscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day's
journey. In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading
the landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no private
automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all
automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons
of gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at the
two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons
of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills,
and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux
that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was a
million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up
from Bordeaux.

But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a
great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and
sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play
with us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with our
shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows
to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered
above us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her
crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough
from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and for
to see," the airplanes.

But the airplanes gave us the day's first opportunity to talk to
the Eager Soul. Until dusk the Gilded Youth had kept her in his
donjon--a first class compartment jammed with hand-baggage, and
where she had insisted that the Young Doctor should come also. We
knew that without being told; also it was evident as we passed up
and down the car aisle during the day that she was acting as a sort
of human Baedeker to the Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, to
whom chateaux and French countryside were an old, old story, sat
by and hooted. But the airplanes pulled him out of his donjon keep
and the Young Doctor with him. He wasn't above showing the Young
Doctor how much a Gilded Youth really knows about mechanics and
airplanes, and we slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul. We
had a human interest in the contest between the Gilded Youth and
the Young Doctor, and a sporting interest which centered in the
daily score. And we gathered this: That it was the Young Doctor's
day. 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 greatest
outdoor game in the world. But he had made it plain that day to
the 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 wanted
no thrills. He was willing to boil surgical instruments or squirt
disinfectant around kitchens to serve. And the Eager Soul liked
that attitude, though it was obvious to us, that she was in the
war game as a bit of a sport and because it was too dull in her
Old Home Town, "somewhere in the United States." And we knew also
what she did not admit, even if she recognized it, that in the
Old Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of her spirit and
intelligence were scarce--and she was out looking for her own Sir
Galahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the Holy
Grail. The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoy
the new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe
free air as an achieving human creature--but, alas! one's forties
are too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eager
as her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world ideals
into which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden away
deeply in the secret places of her heart, were a man and a home
and children.

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

The girl porters came through and turned on the lights in the
train. No lights outside told us that we were hurrying through a
great city. Paris was dark. We went through the underground where
there was more light than there was above ground. The streets seemed
like tunnels and the tunnels like streets. We came into the dingy
station and a score of women porters and red capped girls came for
our baggage. They ran the trucks, they moved the express; they
took care of the mail, and through them we edged up the stairway
into 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 station
peering into the murk. Not a taxi was in the stand waiting; but
from afar we could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that sounded
like the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city. The
air was vibrant with these wild calls. We were an hour waiting there
in the gloom for a conveyance. But when we left the wide square
about the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understood
why the auto horns were bellowing so. For the automobiles were
running lickety-split through the darkness without lights and
the howls of their horns pierced the night. The few street lights
burning a low candle power at the intersections of the great
boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements.
And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and the
Rue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings of
the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to mark
our way. Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait,
and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the
darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of
another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus
as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street.
The din was nerve racking--but highly Parisian. One fancied that
Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation by
multiplying its sound!

We went to the Ritz--now smile; the others did! Not that the Ritz
is an inferior hotel. We went there because it was really the
grandee among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in Paris when
we told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled. The human mind
doesn't seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz
without the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawed
and catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia
are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is
the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for
our rusticity--the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in
us! We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as a
leading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminal
facilities. And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting for
an international figure. There, it seemed to me, the rich and the
great would congregate to invite him to dinners, and to me, at
least, who had imagination, there seemed something rather splendid
in fancying the gentry saying, "Ah, yes--Henry J. Allen, of
Wichita--the next governor of Kansas, I understand!" Henry indicated
his feeling about the Ritz thus: The night we arrived he failed,
for the first time in two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal in
our $17.93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York. The gold braided
uniforms that we saw in the corridors of the Ritz that night made
us pause and consider many things. When we unpacked our valises,
there were the little bundles just as they had come from 43rd
Street. Henry tucked his away with a sigh, and just before he went
to sleep he called across the widening spaces between sleep and
wakening: "I suppose we might have bought that $23.78 outfit, easy
enough!"

It was in the morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wear
off for Henry. He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they were
conserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels of
Paris excepting Friday and Saturday nights. The English, who are
naturally mean, declare that the French save seventy-five per cent
of the use of their hot water by putting the two hot water nights
together, as no living Frenchman ever took a bath two consecutive
days. But it did not seem that way to Henry and me. And anyway we
heard these theories later. But that morning Henry, who doesn't
really mind a cold bath, was ready for it when he happened to look
around the bathroom and found there wasn't a scrap of soap. There
he was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better--if one
should include the dripping from his first plunge--one might say
he was au jus! And what is more, he was au mad. He jabbed the bell
button that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry had
his speech ready for him. "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!" The valet explained that soap was
not furnished with the room. It took some time to get that across
in broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly and
in his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo,
cried: "Say! We are paying," at the dazed look in the valet's
face Henry repeated slower and louder, "We are paying, I say,
fifteen-dollars--fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms. You go
ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?" And he waved
the valet grandly out.

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

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

In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, we
came to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place de
la Concorde. The five floors of a building once used for a man's club
are now filled with bustling, hustling Americans. Those delicately
tinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find it
in the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lower
Broadway, not the place of the bright lights. The click and clatter
of typewriters punctuate the air. Natty stenographers, prim office
women, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants from
perhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department,
the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly through
the corridors. In the reception rooms are men from the ends of the
earth--Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians,
Japs--every nation at peace with America has some business sometime
in that Paris office of the American Red Cross. For there abides
the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he
was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,--Major Grayson M.
P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after
service in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddling
insurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largest
trust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed,
but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He was
so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great
heart to keep it from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp in
his speech which might fool strangers who do not know about the
steel of his nerves and the keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomy
office with a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made quick,
sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant voice that never backed
track nor weakened before a disagreeable situation. He is the man
who more than anyone else has laid out the spending of the major
part of the first one hundred millions gathered in America by the
Red Cross drive last summer. He held his rank as Major in the United
States army, and wore his uniform as though it were his skin, clean,
unwrinkled and handsome, with that gorgeous quality of unconscious
pride that is, after all, the West Pointer's real grace.

As we sat in that noble room, looking out across the Place de
la Concorde, past the Obelisk to the House of Deputies beyond the
Seine, it was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The spectacle
of Major Murphy's young men in their habiliments of service, Red
Cross military uniforms that made them look like lilies of the
valley and bright and morning stars, gave us both something to
think about. The recollection of those $17.93 uniforms of ours in
the rooms at the Ritz was disquieting. We had service hats; these
young gods wore brown caps with leather visors and enameled Red
Crosses above the leather. We had cotton khaki tunics unadorned,
and of a vintage ten years old. They had khaki worsted of a cut
to conform to the newest general order. They had Sam Browne belts
of high potency, and we had no substitute even for that insignia
of power. They had shiny leather puttees. We had tapes. They had
brown shoes--we had not given a fleeting thought to shoes. We might
as well have had congress gaiters! So when the conversation with
Major Murphy turned to a point where he said that he expected us to
go with him to the French front immediately he took a look at our
Sunday best Emporia and Wichita civilian clothes and asked casually,
"Have you gentlemen uniforms?" For me right there the cock crowed
three times. Henry heard it also, and answered slowly, "Well,
no--not exactly."

"Mr. Hoppen," said the Major, "take these gentlemen down the street
and show them where to get uniforms!" Which Mr. Hoppen went and
did. Now Mr. Hoppen is related to the Morgans--the J. Pierpont
Morgans--and he has small notion of Emporia and Wichita. So he took
us to a tailorshop after his own heart. We chose a modest outfit,
with no frills. We ordered one pair of riding breeches each, and
one tunic each, and one American army cap each. The tunic was to
conform to the recent Army regulation for Red Cross tunics, and the
trousers were to match; Henry looked at me and received a distress
signal, but he ignored it and said nonchalantly, "When can we have
them?" The tailor told us to call for a fitting in two weeks, but
we were going to the front before that. That made no difference;
and then Henry came to the real point. "How much," he asked, "will
these be?" The tailor answered in francs and we quickly divided the
sum into dollars. It made $100. "For both?" asked Henry hopefully.
"For each," answered the tailor firmly. There stood Mr. Hoppen, of
Morgans. There also stood Wichita and Emporia. Henry's eyes did not
bat; Mr. Hoppen wore a shimmering Sam Browne belt. Looking casually
at 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 to
have 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 lips
and quaffed it. "Make two," he answered.

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

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

During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to take
us to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and spluttering
through the French language. Henry never was sure of anything
but toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever sticking
sophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen. The
German never actually broke out. If it had, we should have been shot
as spies. But it was so close that it always seemed to be snooping
around ready to jump out. That made it hard for me to shine in
French.

These adventures with the French language were not exactly the
martial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren
Finney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, when
they trundled us out to win the war. Yet these adventures were
serious. They were adventures in lonesomeness. We could imagine
how the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say when
this language began to wash about his ears and submerge him in
its depths. We could fancy American soldiers wandering through
the French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn't
understand the prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak,
isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of
foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the
everlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesickness
that hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a strange land!"

So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to dine with us, and we
let her order a dinner so complicated that it tasted like a lexicon!
We learned much about the Eager Soul that night. She told us of
her two college degrees, her year's teaching experience, her four
years' 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 puzzle
thus; one rambling Bedford limestone American castle in the Country
Club district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, a
lamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some of
it was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love for
Henry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen,
Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, and
Bernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record
as organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state three
years ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by the dozen and candy
in five pound boxes! We could not prove it, but we agreed that she
probably bossed her mother and that the brothers' wives hated her
and the sister's husband loved her to death! She was one of those
socially assured persons in the Old Home Town who are never afraid
of themselves out of it! She confessed that she had seen more
or less of the Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in a
pyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted that she had gone to
the station to bid the Young Doctor good-bye. She had been assigned
to a hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going out the following
day. When we left her at the door of the Hotel Vouillemont, we
plunged back into the encircling gloom of the French language with
real regret.

As we went further into the life about us, we felt that all the men
were in uniform and all the women in mourning. The French mourn
beautifully. France today is the world's tragedy queen whose
suffering is all genuine, but all magnificently done. In the shop
windows of the Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera are
no bright colours--excepting for men's uniforms. In the windows
of the millinery shops, purple is the gayest colour--purple and
lavender and black prevail. On every street are blind windows of
departed shops. Some bear signs notifying customers that they are
closed for the duration of the war; others simply stare blankly
and piteously at passersby who know the story without words.

Yet if it is not a gay Paris, it is anything but a sad Paris. Rather
it is a busy Paris; a Paris that stays indoors and works. For an
hour or two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday also they
throng the boulevards. And the theatres are always well filled;
and there the bright dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombre
gowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies and foyers are not far
from brilliant. Bands and orchestras play in the theatres, but the
music lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically
executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of men
past the military age. We heard "La Tosca" one afternoon and in
the 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 the
musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who
are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and
old hearts. The "other lips and other hearts whose tales of love"
should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are
toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance
of death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europe
today. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music
that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds
and strings and brass is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but
passionless!

Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritz
at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been
notified that we were to start for the front the next morning. We
told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed
to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. He
had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross
commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen
the worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reached
our 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 unwrapping
his bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate
divinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The shirt
went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someone
had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-case
wouldn't get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspection
proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good as a waist
line! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight
inches 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 way
to the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative.
And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for the
valet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rang
for the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left on
the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for
the chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we were
of French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began making
gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures
were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican
party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gestures
and impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took the
recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against his
friend's heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the ideal
they came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen shirt, and in
the tail of it marked out dramatically a "V" slice about the shape
of an old-fashioned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozen
inches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointed
from the shirt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of his
friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was to
go into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to see
intelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures of
that Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew the
truth, and it made her free, so she cried, "Wee wee!" And oratory
had again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o'clock
she returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brown
shirt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist line
of the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for we
found that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulled
down, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possible
to conceal the facts of one's double life. So we went forth with
Major 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 the
French army. Generally when they were at work they were quartered
near a big base hospital; and their work took them from the large
hospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches.
Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area of
France. As the chief activity of the French at the time of our
visit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week
at the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walked
through the ruined city. The Germans had just finished their
evening strafe; two hundred big shells had been thrown over from
their field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth shell
had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next
day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend
just so many shells on each enemy point, and no more. The German
work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact
upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in
the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon
road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way,
is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this road
they think the revitalment trains pass up to the front. But the
sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the
place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before
the war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old
and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, a
bishop's residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled and
shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm and
dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous
that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping
of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the
broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of
their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling
it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about
these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops
and stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling
wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and
risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries
to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts,
pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly
groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little
round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a
table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris
and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it--a thousand little
details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town,
leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was
the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished
their evening strafe.

From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined
villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before
moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously
flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in
a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner
worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots,
some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet
soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and
coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five
minutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men
were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman
of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully,
played host graciously and told us many interesting things about
the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal
so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after
we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French
lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But
this one was different. He was so gentle and so serious without
being at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, and
said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time
was long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem to
bother him. He passed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But his
serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of
his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk,
"Defense absolutement de rire!" "It's absolutely forbidden to
laugh." Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dined
in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs
with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.

So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and
with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that
hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room
in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight
a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was
over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big
Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed
stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a
Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva
lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals
and protect them from air raids.

At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who
were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without
lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and
skidded along and we passed scores of other vehicles going up and
coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red
Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but
ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment
time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions,
food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army
going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we
reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been
climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at
a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could
see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards
into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the
dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged
before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital,
and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing
inside out of the misty rain.

As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the
big 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 a
roar which told us that German shells were coming in near us. As
we stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us,
over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up
the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the
white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of
the dugout passed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment
train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist
came 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 German
shells crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But
the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, passing
us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the
ghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be
spectral--like a line of passing souls. A doctor came out of the
dugout 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 were
landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than
a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the
Germans were shelling a cross-road. They shelled it every night at
midnight to smash the revitalment train. The shells were landing
right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were
passing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an
ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five
wounded. A shell had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even
hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the
road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the
mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared
the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the
ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more
wounded.

After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was
taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little
cemetery 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 mist
up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim
horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It
fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling
together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another
whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship--the
Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not
shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service
man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked
music--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst
of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to
forget death for something more real than death. And so it came
about that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:

And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their special
gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German
kultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the
divine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case for
democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises
the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher,
the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death
for something that defies death, something immortal in the human
heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those common
soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances are
brothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy
is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinship
of men.

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

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

In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the
dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as
they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and
orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head
toward 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 one
knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about
him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was
an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside
the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely,
heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had
been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept
uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one
poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed
the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his
tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever
had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and
gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in
St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English
on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have
you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then
he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the
hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary
bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.
They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft
guns near by--the allies until those August and September German
raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came
again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors
and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of
the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped
handbills 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 fighting
scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is
moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene
in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great
majority of our wounded to return to battle.

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

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

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "It
is 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 for
war as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares that
it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills men
and 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 to
Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals
and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was
a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that
really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching
ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange
land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to
the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in
our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers,
wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our
miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was
a trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread
before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or
talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with
the local statesmen. At five o'clock Henry should be on his way to
the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar
of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that
we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the
sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid
sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my
figure.

But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, through
underbrush, across shell holes to a hidden trench choked with
telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation
post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking
the 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 a
few weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought us
the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208. Among other things
the report had declared "a number of French soldiers were ordered
into their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go
into action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through a
peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half way
up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded
and pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hills
perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened
or narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under shell fire
glimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds. It was hard to
realize that three years before the valley before us had been one
of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey
towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be
"that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There
it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped
off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope
of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in
leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked
kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Roland
crossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines--two white
gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratched
between them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wire
entanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a few
hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.
At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the
gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused to
rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communication
trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were
brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had
been converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher
bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the little
shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the
scene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distant
boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the
trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death
agony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party
climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses
toward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grew
alive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about
excitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Army
major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared
with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar
outfit. 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; showed
him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it
clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted
against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German
hardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trenches
were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.
Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the
hill.

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

The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when we
finally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagne
battle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands,
and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of English
tanks abandoned by the French. Lying out there in No Man's Land
between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn
out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else
in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne
drive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just how
far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last
spring, before America declared war. To begin: The French morale
went bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. The
French commission told us how sorely France needed the American
war declaration. But to say that the morale of a nation has gone
bad means so much. It is always a struggle even in peace, even
in prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nation
to keep any Nation honest. But when hope begins to sag, when the
forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant in
every nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil times
to 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 and
punishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917.
German money has been traced to persons high in authority. A network
of German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of men
high in government--the kaiser is not above using the thief and the
harlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured into
certain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic
disaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intrigue
in Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the result
of three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly
the weakening under the strain of all these things, of this "too
too solid flesh and blood." During the winter of 1916-17 soldiers
at the front received letters from home telling of starvation and
freezing and sickness in their families. And trench conditions in
the long hard winter were all but unbearable. When a soldier finally
got a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroad
system breaking down and he had long waits at junction points with
no sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter. French soldiers going
home 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 home
bringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trench
misery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to the
home while the soldier was away. Then when he went back to fight,
he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers without
supplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quantities to supply
the battle needs. In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head
in the army and ordered the men into their own barrage. Hundreds
were slaughtered. Thousands were verging on mutiny. A regiment
refused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. The American
ambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did was
when they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!
Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the department
heads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, and
the withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achieved
all but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth.

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

All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American Red
Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and
disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward
bound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name of
every French soldier's family that is in need, and that family's
needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the sure
hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of
the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation's political
consciousness 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 blotched
acres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenches
and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles,
and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture
of 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 had
been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and
the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German
airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually
as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and
fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a
wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It
was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must
have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate,
all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and
there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to
their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle
of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and
found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the
pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron
can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet
square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the
hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one
in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about,
gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast
upon 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 are
intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires
and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and
the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the
church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass
as art treasures.

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

We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back
of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk
with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to
Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the
stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole
in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have
weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it
clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but
a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up
on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk
French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four
minutes, we left town.

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden
only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven into
mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five
miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the
road indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our driver
tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour
and 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 sharply
from the German lines and soon passes out of the German range and
the shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shell
holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley
as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows
and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the
earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they
gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with
colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the
checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall
dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through
the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our
faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on
their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags
of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills,
all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of
colours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered,
there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--even
the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the
German bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan,
from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the
Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running
pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hurt badly?" asked another boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up
by 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 Pershing
and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France
which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental
enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story
of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we
disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy
him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was
irritated 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 in
Wichita and Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, that we
two thick-set, sedentary, new world replicas of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza should be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. We
were not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wives
were three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married man
gets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of his
wife. For when he gets into the barbed wire tangle of a love affair,
he needs the wise counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we were,
two fat old babes in the woods and here came the Gilded Youth, the
Eager Soul and the Young Doctor--sping! like a German shell--right
into our midst, as it were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasant dreams--indeed!

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: And he sat cross legged]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have in France a few hundred thousand men and will soon have a
million and more who are offering their lives in Service. But the
whole French nation is giving thus. And it is without hate. One
finds instead of hatred in France a feeling of deep disgust for the
German and all his works. The spirit of the French is not vicious.
It is beautiful. When the war ceases that may subside, may retire
to 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 sufficiently
atoned for, dusk was falling. And Henry broke away from the gothic
arches of the trees and made for a tavern. He had learned that
one must take food in France where he can find it, and ten minutes
later we came upon him in front of the inn, talking in a slow loud
voice to what was either the inn-keeper's daughter or his pretty
young wife thus: "I said," Henry paused and nodded his head and beat
the thing in with his hand; "we want some supper--de jurnay--toot
sweet!" She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders very prettily
and 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." That
was the only part of the French language that Henry was entirely
sure of--that and "comb be-ah!" But we could not get it through
her head. So we loaded ourselves into the car and headed back for
St. Dizier, where at least they understood Henry's gestures, and
we could get food!

Our next journey took us to the greatest training camp in the
allied part of the world. It is not the largest camp, of course.
It accommodates less than twenty thousand soldiers. But it is what
might be called the post graduate college of all training camps.
Here ten thousand men come every week from other training camps
all over the earth, and are given intensive training. For six days,
eighteen and twenty hours a day, these soldiers, trained by many
months' labour on other fields, are given the Ph.D. in battle lore,
and are turned out the seventh day after a Saturday night lecture
on hate, and shot straight up to the front. In all France there is
no more grisly place for the weak-stomached man than this training
camp--not even the front line trenches will kick up his gorge more
sedulously. Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough.
One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, and in the ten
thousand acre plain one sees horse-men galloping, soldiers running,
great trucks and tanks lumbering over the field; men digging, men
throwing hand-grenades, men clambering over trench walls, stumbling
over crater holes, men doing all the innumerable things that are
learned by those who carry on the handicraft of war.

But when one starts with the first class and goes along through
the day's work with it, the deadly seriousness of the training gets
to him. The first thing the first class does is to gather around a
sergeant major, who in a few simple words tells his pupils how to
use the bayonet. Then they go out and use the bayonet as he has
taught them. Then the pupils gather around another sergeant major,
who tells them how to use the hand-grenade or the knife or the butt
of 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 to
a part of the ground where some trenches are sunken in the earth.
Before the trenches are barbed wire entanglements and deep jagged
shell craters. The imitation enemy trenches badly bombed by barrage
lie twenty rods beyond. The men are taken in hand by the amiable
sergeant major and taught to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, to
simulate the most murderous passion, and the simulation of a husky
youth in his twenties of a murderous passion is realistic enough
to make your flesh creep; for the very simulation produces the
passion, as every wise man's son doth know. Then the youths are
lined 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 lieutenant
goes over. In the English papers the list of dead begins "Second
lieutenant, unless otherwise designated." And in the war zone the
second lieutenants are known as "The suicides' club." Well, the
second lieutenants get on top, and, down in the trench, number one
hands his leg to number two; clear down the line; number two boosts
number one to the top, then number one lends a hand to number two
and pulls him out. Meanwhile enemy fire is hot. The line forms in
open order. The blood curdling yells begin--and mingle in an animal
roar that sounds like the howl of an orang-outang in the circus
just 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 and
shell fire to the enemy trench; for experience has proven that if
the men run into that fire they will be out of breath and probably
go down in the hand-to-hand, knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye conflict with
knife and bayonet and gun butt that always occurs when they go over
the top to charge the enemy trench. As they near the enemy trench
the bestial howl rises, and as they jump into the shell-shattered
trenches the howl is maniacal. In the trenches are canvas bags made
to represent wounded enemies. The first wave over the top leaves
these bags for the stretcher bearers. But by the time the next
wave comes over, or the third wave comes, the stretcher bearers
are supposed to have cleared the trenches of wounded enemies, and
after that every soldier is supposed to jab his bayonet in every
bag in the trenches, as he is expected to jab every dead body, to
prevent an enemy from playing possum and then getting to a presumably
disabled enemy machine gun and shooting our soldiers in the back.
Every time a student soldier jabs a canvas bag he snarls and growls
like a jackal, and if he misses a bag it counts against him in the
day's markings. Wave after wave comes over, and prisoners are sent
to the rear, if there are guards to take them. If not prisoners are
killed, and one does not waste ammunition on them. It may be well
to pause here to say that in the gentle art of murdering the business
of taking prisoners is not elaborately worked out. They learn that
by rote, rather than by note. The Canadians, since two of their
men 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 and
me.

"What part of the states do you Canadians come from?" we ask. They
grin 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 the
truth."

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

"Well, it's like this. We go into a trench after them damn brutes
has been playing machine guns on us, knowing as soon as we get
in they'll surrender, but trying to kill as many of us as they
can before they give up. Then they raise up their hands and begin
yelling, 'Kamerade, Kamerade,' and someone says, 'Come on, fellers,
let's take this poor beggar,' and we're about to do it when along
comes 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! polishes
him off and cleans out the trench."

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

WE: "Now, boys, does that always happen? How often do you fellows
polish 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 any
Prussian to surrender to any Canadian!"

When the line out there in the training camp has gone to its
objective, which usually is the third or fourth enemy trench, the
men begin digging in. Then they go back to the sergeant major for
more instructions. The digging in is usually done under a curtain
of fire to protect them. It is a great picture.

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

The liveliest part of this martial cloister was the section devoted
to the bayonet practice. And as we watched the men trying to rip
the vest buttons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrangements
with a bayonet, while loping along at full speed, we recalled a
Civil War story which may well be revived here. A Down-easter from
Vermont and a Southerner were going around and around one day at
Shiloh, each trying to get the other with the bayonet, but both
were good dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting winded he
cried between puffs:

"Watch aout--! Mind what yer dewin'! Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yew
got 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. They
told us that the French chasseurs, the famous blue devils, were
more or less careless about the way they forgot to take prisoners.
They are a proud people, from the French Alps, and exceedingly
democratic. A German brigadier, caught under their barrage, came
up to a troop of chasseurs and when they demanded his surrender
asked curtly, "Where's your superior officer?" They pointed down
the hill, and he started down. At a safe distance they threw a hand
grenade into him and obliterated him, remarking, "Well, the world
is that much safer for democracy." It is told of a Canadian who
came 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 sorry
I have but the one; but divide it between you!" There is also the
story of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go out on a night raiding
party--crawling on their bellies with their knives as their only
weapons. 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 to
hunt for a fit!" There is also the story of the festive Tommy who
tried to play a practical joke on his German prisoner by slipping
a lighted bomb in the German's pocket. The Tommy then started to
run; the German thought he must keep up with his captor and Tommy
realized that the joke was on him, just as the bomb went off and
killed them both.

Such stories are innumerable. They are probably untrue. But they
indicate what men at war think is funny; they reflect a certain
impoliteness and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it wears
on it grows more or less unneighbourly. And yet the upheaval of
war is just a passing emotional disturbance in the normal life of
men. Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no glorifying
of war; men in war, at least on our side of the line, hate war
more than they hate the Germans. And with the whole heart of the
civilized world--if one frankly may call the Turk and the Prussian
the savages that they are--set upon maintaining this war to a
victory for the allies, civilization may be said to be in the war
as 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 come
with justice, and in the meantime France is as deeply devoted to
healing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the war. Six hundred
French societies are devoted to various war works of mercy! Every
man and woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse is working
in one of these societies. And yet life goes on with all this
maladjustment of its cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordinary
routine. There never were more joyous dahlias and phlox and china
asters than we saw coming back from that training camp where men
were learning the big death game. And when we came to Paris the
real business of war seemed remote. Of course, Paris is affected by
the 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 mighty
amiable. At noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side-walks,
and until nine o'clock at night they give a fair imitation of
their former happiness. Then they close and the picture shows are
crowded, and the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and their
women folk at the opera and at the vaudeville shows more than at
the other shows. During the summer and the autumn a strong man put
on a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was the talk of the
town. His game was a tug of war. He announced that he would give
fifty dollars to any soldier who could withstand him. The strong
man 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 throw
the soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back of the strong
man. It is a simple act; one that soon would tire Broadway, but
when one remembers that soldiers bring their local pride with them
to Paris from the ends of the earth, from New Zealand, from India,
from Canada, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China, from
Australia, and then when one remembers that the men of his country
are gathered in the theater to back every local athlete, it is
easy to see why the strong man holds week after week, month after
month, season after season. Every night some proud nation gathers
in the show house to get that fifty dollars with its favourite
son. And every night some favourite son almost gets it. And if the
strong man didn't fudge a little, pinch the favourite son's hands
on the pole and make him let go, almost every night the strong man
would be worsted. The struggle sets the house yelling. It is the
only real drama in Paris. We noticed that the shows of Paris which
appealed to the eyes and ears were far below the American standard.
In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher
grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than
Broadway 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 Follies
was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be
in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville
house this year. Sometimes they were done in French, sometimes
in English. In Genoa, one may say in passing that we heard one of
the songs from "Hitchy-Coo" done in Italian. It was eery! American
artists are popular in Paris. We saw a girl at three show houses
in Paris, under the name of Betty Washington, doing a gipsy dance,
playing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, who has a keen
eye, noticed that she had her toes rouged! But she always was good
for four encores, and she usually got a good start at the fifth from
Henry and me; we had just that much national pride! Great throngs
of soldiers filled these gay show houses. The French, the English,
and the Australians seemed satisfied with them. But the Canadians
and Americans sniffed. To them Paris is a poor show town.

One night we fell into a Boulevard show the like of which we had
never seen before. It was a political revue! The whole evening was
devoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration,
at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at the
high taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skits
were done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms of
burlesque. A good crowd--but not a soldier crowd--sat through it
and applauded appreciatively. Imagine an American audience devoting
a whole evening to a theatrical performance exclusively concerned
with Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roosevelt, former Mayor
Mitchel, and LaFollette. In America we get little politics out of
the theater. In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they get
much politics from the theater. The theater is free in France--and
apparently not so closely censored as the newspapers. We learned that
night at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapers
announced it. And in learning of the crisis we had this curious
social experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian as
the Revue. During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henry
and me. We could understand a vaudeville show, and by following
the synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy. But
here in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satire
were at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. Henry was
for getting out and going somewhere else. But we had a dollar a seat
in 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 seats
next to us, and the woman began talking English. She was sitting
next to me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. We asked her
if it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jays
from Middle Western America. She replied cordially enough. And she
gave us a splendid running interpretation of the show. The man with
her seemed friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding her hand
in the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when the
lights went clear down. But that spelled a newly married middle-aged
couple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she,
late from his office, was at the head of his household. Between
acts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady. We
exchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner of
strangers in a strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: "What
does 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 him
up in a cafe an hour ago!"

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy "Oh." But we had a good chat
just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the
cabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics.
But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters
are free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takes
all 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 their
lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of
their own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, the
kind is easy to find. There is kultur!

Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry did
not mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable and
as improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Every
man has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love from
marriage, and establishing it beautifully in another relation, is
my 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 back
to the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperoned
on the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we could
understand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity all
over France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth in
the hospital at--we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not the
place--we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The letter
she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to other
hands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should have
been. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimental
work in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. But
the cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital four
hours out of Paris. The place had that curious French quality
of charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put into
our "places and palaces." Down a winding village street--a kind
of low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened with
uniforms like the streets of most French villages these days--we
wormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building--an
official looking building. It was not official, we learned--just
a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road
leads 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. But
when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard,
gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into
a garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners
of the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreens
of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and
a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the
walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox
and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay
sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a
new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the
street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was
made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built
architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to
represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board
partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;
and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron
beds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the
long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was
American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We
were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students
who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their
brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as
handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if
they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all
the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place
a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a
king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and
were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was
sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded.
It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but
from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet
wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles
permanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in the
mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us
how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on
out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land,
stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the
wounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officer
with a shell-wound in his leg.

He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something like
a first aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor paused, picked
a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the
narrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the
ambulance." Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a half
mile back and the shells were still popping--more or less--around
us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled
and 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. "We
were talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked
up. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. It
got 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 be
polite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on the
hoary, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless of
our spanking new uniforms and cried: "Well, my Heavenly home!" He
nodded, drew a deep breath and said, "That's the how of it."

[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is
listening 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 make
no warning sign?"

"Not a peep--not a chirrup," answered the Doctor, still diffidently.
Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a rather
remote past: "It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two men
who stood where we were together--I, who had put my hands in his
live flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, and
he who was clinging to my body for support--you would think we had
come together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was over
for 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 was
a man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years to
make a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a
doctor 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, looting
and dynamiting villages--in all their martial enterprises, think
unlike 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 Young
Doctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell him
something of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For the
Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand?
What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuaries
of lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, to
fight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehow
or somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and we
knew it. So Henry asked: "You received your letter?" And when he
thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: "Did she tell you
that the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?"

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

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

"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, the
proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the straying
crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there
in the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion in
pride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that it
meant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understand
about the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in,
"Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital
yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have two
to one. It's all over but the shouting." And Henry laughed at the
Young Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his
bandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yard
was disturbing news to him.

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

We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the
news we had of the girl. Long after we had passed through the garden
gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch
and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we
thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into
china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox,
and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the
melancholy 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 even
in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the
alchemy 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. This
work had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper offices
in Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the big
war. For days and days we had been riding in motor cars along
the line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances had
hauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches of
the front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had
snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the
first aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--most
of which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon or
the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how
to 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-father
to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and
was for ever being "continued in our next." And it was all--riding
along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along
trenches, and ducking from the shells--all vastly diverting. We
had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of
felicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almost
finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal
and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came
to 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 in
it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught
us; and we started.

So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in
Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn
day, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green
hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The two
Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting
outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from
Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.
As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about
the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have
to vote. So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinois
congressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us,
in uniforms ourselves, after a fashion, but looking conspicuously
civilian, and incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea-green
hunting outfit looked more soldierly than we. For although
we wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissioned
officers--commissioned as Red Cross Colonels--and although we wore
Parisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that they
humped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at the
shoulders. A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform
without looking like a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling the
tunics our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and enviously at the
slim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their god-like
effects. For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and a
fat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! So we paced the
platform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiers
of France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked by
us, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were. For the
American Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those latitudes
as it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swinging
through Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies,
a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a million
dollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of Northern
Italy choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!
Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italian
cities, from Venice to Naples. Under that flag the American Red
Cross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian
relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Cross
uniform which made the soldiers' eyes bug out there at the border
in the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy. But we
three unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strange
country.

[Illustration: A fat man can't wear the modern American Army uniform
without looking like a sack of meal]

Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa. And coming direct
from Paris, where men out of uniform were few, the thing that
opened our mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw. There
were worlds and worlds of men in Genoa; men in civilian clothes.
The streets were black with men. Straw hats, two piece suits, gay
neck-ties--things which were as remote from France as from Mars,
figures that recalled the ancient days of one's youth, before the
war; days in New York, for instance, where men in straw hats and
white crash were common. These things we saw with amazement in
Genoa! And then our eyes caught the flashy bands on their arms--bands
that indicated that these men are in the industrial reserves, not
drafted because they are doing industrial war work. But for all of
these industrial reservists there was an overplus of men in Genoa.
It is a seaport and there were "the market girls and fishermen, the
shepherds and the sailors, too," a crowd gathered from the world's
ends, and we sat under the deep arches before a gay cafe, listened to
New York musical hits from the summer's roof gardens, and watched
the show. In that day--only three weeks before the German invasion--the
war was a long way from Genoa. At the next table to us an American
sea-faring man was telling an English naval officer about the
adventures of three sailing ships which had bested two submarines
three days before in the Mediterranean; some Moroccan sailors were
flirting across two tables with some pretty Piedmontese girls,
and inside the cafe, the harp, the flute and the violin were doing
what they could to make all our hearts beat young! A picture show
across the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and a
vaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from
the spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmic
swish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music. Here
and there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning;
but uniforms and mourners were uncommon. The war was a tale that
is told.

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

Yet there was to me a change in Rome--from the Rome one knew who
had been there eight years before--a change stranger and deeper
than the change one felt in coming from Rome to Paris. This new
Rome was a cleaner Rome, a more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome.
Something had been happening to the people. They wore better
clothes, they seemed to live in cleaner tenements; they certainly
had a different squint at life from the Romans of the first decade
of this century. One heard two answers to the question that arose
in one's heart. One group said: "It is prosperity. Italy never has
seen such prosperity as she has seen during the past ten years.
There has been work for everyone, and work at good wages. So you
see 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 for
small wages, and have lived in squalor. We still work as we always
have worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay in
many ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguards
thrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activities
of capital. The Socialists in government have forced many reforms
in housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profits
of labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better things
rather 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 promoted
the other!

But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably. It has paralysed
the tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in the
world. 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 at
home, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid
concerning life's real interests--the mother and daughter who in
the old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe,
flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from
Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the
seasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that precious
pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see
Rome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done for
democracy at any rate!

And the passing of this "relic of old dacincy," the shabby genteel
of the earth from Rome--even if the passing is a temporary social
phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the
working class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class as
Kansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upper
class, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it is
elsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king is
training his son to run for president. The high caste Romans have
an Austrian pride, that "goeth before destruction." For politically
their power is sadly on the wane. They are miserably moth-eaten
compared to our own arrogant princes of Wall Street or even compared
to the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out at
the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them. One feels
vaguely that these Italian nobles are passing through a rather
mean stage of decay. For a time during the latter part of the last
century and during the first decade of this century, the Italian
noblemen tried to edge into business. They lent their names
to promotion schemes, and the schemes, upon the whole, turned out
badly, and the people learned to distrust all financial schemes
under noble patronage; so the nobility is going to work. A few
strong families remain--the present royal house of Savoy is among
the strong ones.

Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to the
King, who in the King's absence at the front with his soldiers, was
a sort of acting king on the job in Rome. The automobile took us
into the first court of the Royal Palace. Now the Royal Palace--save
for a few executive offices--has been turned into an army hospital
and we saw doctors and nurses dodging in and out of the innumerable
corridors, and smelled iodoform everywhere. A major domo, in scarlet,
who seemed in the modern disinfected smell of the place like the
last guard of mediaevalism, greeted us as we alighted from our
car; a great, powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on his
scarlet broadcloth. He showed us into a passage where the minister
waited who was to take us to the Duke. The minister led us down a
long stately gallery, out of the twentieth century into the fifteenth,
where at the end of the gallery a most remarkably caparisoned
servant stood at attention. He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable
vividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth. But we
could have passed that easily enough. The thing that held us was
his blue plush knee breeches. It didn't seem fitting that a man in
this age of work and wisdom should wear shimmering blue plush knee
breeches for everyday. He was a big fellow and puffy. And the
scarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave the place an olden
golden air. But alas! The twentieth century burst in. For he bowed
us to an elevator--a modern Chicago elevator inspected by an accident
company, guaranteeing the passengers against injuries! From the
elevator we were emptied into a nineteenth century corridor, guarded
by a twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him into
a waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown
and gold decoration--but modern enough--and walled in old tapestry.
The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless
leisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed
standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and
bases of this furniture were great--unbelievably great, rococo
gilded legs--legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheening
agony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves to
dropping to the floor in distress.

Henry nudged me as our Kansas eyes bugged out at the Byzantine
splendeur and whispered: "Bill, what this place needs is a boss
buster movement. How the Kansas legislature would wallop this
splendeur in the appropriation bill! How the Sixth District outfit
would strip the blue plush off our upholstered friend by the
elevator and send him shinning home in a barrel. Topeka," sighed
Henry, 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 dress
uniform, with a light blue sash across his shoulder. He shook hands
with us. And he wore gloves and didn't say, "Excuse my glove," as
we 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 the
minister stalking through another door, saw the minister formally
bowing and then we found that we had been moved into another room--a
rather plainly furnished office room, such as one might find in
New York or Chicago when one called on the head of a bank or of an
industrial corporation. We had left the "days of old when knights
were bold," and had come bang! into the latest moment of the twentieth
century. We were shaking hands rather cordially with a kindly-eyed,
bald-headed little man in a grey VanDyke beard, who wore a black
frock coat, rather a low-cut white vest, a black four-in-hand rather
wider than the Fifth Avenue mode, striped dark grey trousers, and
no jewelry except a light double-breasted gold watch-chain. He was
the Duke of Genoa, who to all intents and purposes is the civilian
ruler of Italy while the King is with the army. We found four chairs
grouped around a sofa, and we sat while the duke, with a diffidence
that amounted to shyness, talked with us about most unimportant
things. The interview was purely ceremonial. It had no relation
to the passports we were asking from his government to visit the
Italian front, though this request had made the visit necessary.
Several times there were pauses in the conversation--dead stops
in the talk, which court etiquette required the Duke to repair. We
didn't worry about them, for always he began to repair these gaps
in the talk rather bashfully but kindly, and always the subject
was impersonal and of indifferent interest. He made no sign that
the interview was over, but we knew, as well as though a gong had
struck, when to go. So we went, and it seemed to me that the Duke
put more real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his welcome.
It was half-past five. He had been at work since eight. And perhaps
it was fancy, but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italian
eye a determination to knock off and take a half holiday.

We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean as General Pershing's
or 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 given
place to a gentleman in a business suit who probably rings for his
stenographer and dictates in part as follows: "Yours of even date
received and contents noted; in reply will say!" We carried away
an impression that the lot of royalty, like the policeman's lot,
"is not a happy one." Talking it all over, we decided that in the
modern world there is really any amount more fun running a newspaper
than being a king, and for the size of the town, much more chance
of 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 king
at Udine. He was living in a cottage a few miles out of town in a
quiet little grove that protected him from airplanes. Now Henry's
nearest brush to royalty was two years ago when in the New York
suffrage campaign his oratory had brought him the homage of some of
the rich and the great. Kings really weren't so much of a treat to
Medill, who had taken his fill of them in childhood when his father
was minister to England. But nevertheless they lorded it over me
when they saw me because the king wasn't on my calling list. But
they couldn't keep from me the sad fact that they had started out
to make the royal call without gloves--hoping probably to catch
the king with their bare hands--and had been turned back by the
Italian colonel who had them in charge. Henry once sang in the
cantata of "Queen Esther," and Medill insists that all the way
up to the royal cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath the
song: "Then go thou merrily, then go thou merrily, unto the king!"
and also: "Haman, Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured one
in all the king's dominions!" just to show that finical colonel
who took them back to Udine for gloves that Wichita was no stranger
to the inside politics of the court. However, gloves seemed to be
the only ceremonial frill required, and they went to the king's
business office as informally as they would go to the private room
of a soap-maker in Cincinnati. They found the king a soft-spoken
little man. Henry said he looked very much like the mayor of
Kansas City, and was equally unassuming and considerate. He asked
his guests what had become of the Progressive party, and they
pointed to themselves as the "captain and crew of the Nancy brig."
Then they talked on for a time about many things--such as would
interest the Walrus and the Carpenter. Then the accounts of the
visit changed. This is Henry's: "Well, finally after Medill began
cracking his knuckles and the king began crossing and recrossing
his legs, I saw it was time to go. I knew how the king felt. Every
busy man has to meet a lot of bores. I sit hours with bores who
flow into the Wichita Beacon office, and I began to appreciate just
how the king felt. So I cleared my throat and said: 'Well Medill,
don't you think we'd better excuse ourselves to his majesty and
go?' The king put up his hand mildly and said: 'O please!' and the
colonel 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 shaking
hands around, the colonel led us out. And I didn't know that I had
committed social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when we
were in the corridor: 'Oh you republicans--you republicans, how you
do like to show royalty its place!'" Medill has another version.
He declares that Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as he
could, then he rose and cried: "O King! live for ever, but Medill
and I must pull our freight!" This version probably is apochryphal!
The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: "Well, how
in the dickens was I to know that a king always gives the high sign
for company to leave!"

This Italian king is a vital institution. He could be elected
president. For he is a mixer, in spite of his diffident ways. When
the army in Northern Italy was hammering away at the Austrians, the
king was with the soldiers. One gets the impression that he is with
the people pretty generally in their struggle with the privileged
classes. For he has lived peaceably with a socialist cabinet for
some time. He is wise enough to realize that if the aristocracy is
crumbling, the institution of royalty will crumble with aristocracy
if royalty makes an ally of the nobility. So the king and the
Socialists get along splendidly. Now the Socialists in Italy are
of several kinds. There are the city Socialists, who are chiefly
interested in industrial conditions--wages, old age pensions,
employment insurance, and the like; a group much like the Progressive
party in the United States of 1912. We saw the works and ways of
these Socialists in every Italian town that we visited. Either they
or the times have done wonders. And at any rate this is the first
time in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generally
reached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into the
middle classes. Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the land
question, and they have had smaller success than their industrial
brethren. We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. Our road
took us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertile
acres lying in a wide beautiful plain. We passed through half
a dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. None
of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here.
The people in these towns are peasants--and look it. They are the
peasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of the
Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Along
the dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules
tandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart's approach.
The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The
mules took their way. Carts passed and repassed each other on the
road. 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 Rome
and Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures. All
day going to Frascatti and coming home we passed these beggarly
looking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which stands proudly upon
a great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acres
stretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. Villages flashed
in the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards and
the tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye and
soothed the soul. We stood looking at it for a long time. With us
were 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 year
after year!" explained our host.

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

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

"What's this land worth an acre?" This question came from me, who
has 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 discussion
developed a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land.
With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price
of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of
the compass. Finally our host explained: "The truth of the matter
is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men.
Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for from
three hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy."

And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian
Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages,
the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land
and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving
vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of
a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet
losing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer,
which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the
land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden,
vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no
capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the
tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where
labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was
a disheartening problem.

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

Medill and Henry went to another lookout, leaving me with the Italian
soldiers in the trench. Their luncheon came up, a fine rich soup,
with bread cubes in it, some potatoes and vegetables. It looked
palatable and was good. There was enough, but not plenty. As we
sat in the trench waiting for Henry and Medill, one of the heroes
beside me, after thinking it all out carefully, burst forth with
this:

"I livea in Pittsburgh."

It was plain to his comrades that he had put his meaning through
to me. They clearly were impressed by his prowess. This cheered
him 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 oriflamme
of speech in our faces.

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

In another hour we had wormed our way through the tunnels to the
other side of the peak, and had scrambled down the mountainside
to the general headquarters. Never since Hannibal's day were more
interesting brigade headquarters established. They were niched
into the mountain side about 4,000 feet above a gorge below. The
sleeping 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. That
morning two airplanes--an Italian plane and an Austrian--met out
by the tram wire in a battle. It could be seen as easily from the
diningroom platform as if it had been half down the block; yet the
airmen were 4,000 feet in the air. We had luncheon at the brigade
headquarters, and it was made a gala occasion. Some one had brought in
an Austrian cow which was brigade property and we had real cream.
Otherwise it was a war dinner. We had hors d'ouvres--thin sliced
dried ham, sausages, and sardines--a delectable paste with parmesian
cheese on it, roast beef and brown potatoes, salad and broiled
chicken, and then the chef d'ouvres, the cream upon a charlotte
russe! After that came cheese and coffee. Chianti and a cider
champagne were served. The mess was proud of itself, as it should
have been. But it seems sad to think how soon that Austrian cow
went home. For within three weeks from the time we sat there, the
general had surrendered in the gulch below the air-tram wire and the
Germans 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 left
the war behind to stroll by moonlight over the beautiful mediaeval
town. There is a fine square there--not so broad as the square at
St. Mark's where the tourists used to feed the doves, but to me
it seemed as beautiful. For upon the square was the famous arcade
which Palladio erected around the city-hall of the place. It stood
beautiful and gloomy before us in the moonlight, one of the world's
real bits of architecture. As Americans we had a special interest
in the arcade because it was typical of the best of Palladio's
work and our own Thomas Jefferson, studying it, had reproduced
it and Americanized it in some of the buildings of the University
of Virginia, buildings that have had a distinct influence upon
American architecture! A number of Palladio's other works we saw
that night, softened and glorified by the moonlight. And we saw
also an old French house, not twenty-five feet wide, but a gem of
French architecture erected before the discovery of America. Finally
we went back and stood by the statue of Palladio and listened to the
low rumble of the guns on the front and wondered what the Germans
would do with such a lovely thing as this Vicenza if by any chance
they ever took it. That day we had looked down from a mountain-top
upon an Austrian town lying peacefully in the valley below us
directly under the Italian guns. The guns of the Austrians and the
Italians were smashing away at each other from the mountain-tops
over and across the town.

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

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

The German theory, of course, is exactly opposite to this. They
would smash the town, if they were to take it, to put fear into the
hearts of the inhabitants and command obedience; and if they knew
they could not take it they would smash it to cripple the enemy that
much! We of the Allies desire respect and loyalty that come from
reason. 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 us
more forcibly in Italy than it came elsewhere because of certain
contrasts. They were contrasts in what might be called public
wisdom. The Germans take better care of their poor than some of
the Allies. The Germans know that poverty is a curse to a nation,
and during the past generation they have done much to alleviate
it. And in alleviating poverty they have kept their poor docile;
and they go into battle feeling that they have something to fight
for. In the allied countries too often we have let the devil take
the hindermost. As we rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan we
wondered, looking at the farms and the farmers along the road, why
those farmers should be asked to die for a country that kept them
in so low an estate. And yet they were better off than the farmers
of Southern Italy. But in socializing industry the Italian farmer
has been forgotten, and when the press came upon the Italian
front, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay down their arms,
deluded by a German spy ruse so simple that it should have fooled
no intelligent soldier. But they were not intelligent. Their
intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations,
and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy! You
cannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousand
years' sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier who
is 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 grade
of men, who wore wide cocked hats, like those worn by the British
troops in the American revolution. The cocked hats of the Italian
carabinieri are as wide as their handsome shoulders and they
make striking figures. This one who entered our compartment was
drunk--grandly, gorgeously and sociably drunk. He wanted to talk
to us. He tried Italian and we shook our heads. Then Medill tackled
him in French and he shook his head. Then Henry squared off and
gave him the native Kansas English--with appropriate gestures. But
the Italian sighed amiably and it was clear he was balked. Then
he looked up and down the outer corridor of the car, came in, shut
the 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 sacrifice
to get conversation going. He rambled along in a maudlin way, and
finally picked up an illustrated paper containing an account of
the Turin riots, which angered him, and then and there being, that
Italian soldier told us in German the story of what he called der
grosser rebellion! To talk German in an allied country today is
as much as one's life is worth. For a soldier to talk German is a
crime; for a soldier to tell three foreigners about a riot in his
country, which he, as a soldier behind machine guns had to suppress,
killing hundreds, was mighty near to treason. And we gasped. We
thought he might be testing us out as potential spies. So we shut
up. But he ambled on, and slowly, as the liquor overcame him, he
ran down and went sound asleep with the offending paper in his arms.
Perhaps he was one of those Germans wearing the Italian uniform who
in the German drive three weeks later gave commands to the ignorant
peasant regiments to lay down their arms and surrender! At least
it was reported in Europe that thousands of them abandoned their
works under the command of German spies!

When we arrived at Milan we found there waiting for us a note
from the Gilded Youth, whom we had met coming over on the boat
from America. And it brought back our everlasting love affair. It
is curious how that love affair kept projecting itself into the
consciousness of two middle-aged men who reasonably may be supposed
to have passed out of the zone of true romance. But the memory of
the hazel eyes of the Gilded Youth as he gazed at the pretty face
of the young nurse there in the moonlight at Landrecourt, with
such exaltation and joy, kept bobbing back into our minds as we
saw other lovers in other lands, married and single, crossing our
paths. And there was the Young Doctor, diffident and reticent, who
had his heart set on the girl, and the contest furnished us with
a deathless theme for speculation. And here at Milan came this
letter--just a note forwarded from Paris--telling us that the Gilded
Youth could "stand and wait" no longer; he was going to hit back.
He had quit the Ambulance service for aviation. And he was in
a training camp near Paris. We wondered how many times during his
training he would slip across the sky to Landrecourt to visit his
true love. The one-horse buggy had been the only lover's chariot
known to Henry and me, and we remembered how a red-wheeled cart
used to lay out the neighbours in the heroic days of the nineties.
So in our meditative moments we considered what a paralysing
spectacle it would be for the neighbours to see a young man come
swooping down upon his lady love's bower in an airplane and Henry,
who was betting on the Gilded Youth as against the Doctor, began
taking even money again!

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

Milan we found today is an industrial town, entirely modern,
dominated not by the cathedral as of old, but by the spirit of the
new Italy. They took us to a luncheon given by the American chamber
of commerce. We heard nothing of their antiquities, and little
of their ruins. We had to fight to get time to see the cathedral,
whose windows are boarded up or filled with white glass; but the
Milanese were anxious to have us see their great factories; their
automobile works, their Caproni airship plant and the up-to-the-minute
organization of industrial efficiency everywhere. Here in Milan
we saw thousands of men out of uniform, but wearing the ribbon
arm-band of the industrial reservists. We fancied these Milanese
were bigger, huskier men than the men in the south of Italy, and
that they looked better-kept and better-bred. They certainly are a
fierce and indomitable people. The Austrians don't raid the Milanese
in airships. They said that once the Austrians came and the next day
the Milanese loaded up a fleet of big Capronis with 30,000 pounds
of high explosives, sailed over Austria and blew some town to atoms.
So Milan has never been bothered since as other border towns of
Italy have been bothered by air-raiders. The days we spent in Milan
were 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 beautiful
as Milan. In Turin we saw the scene of the riot--the "grosser
rebellion," which our carabinieri friend told us about. Signor
Nitti, now a member of the Italian cabinet, who entertained us
in Rome, told the Italian parliament--according to the American
newspapers--that the millers caused the riot. The bread ration
did 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 about
the town were threatened with the police if they congregated. They
congregated, and some troops from a nearby training camp were called.
The troops were new; they were also friends of the strikers. They
refused to fire. Then the strikers built barricades in the streets
and in a day or so the regular troops came down from the mountains
with machine guns, fired on the barricades and when hundreds were
hit the rebellion was quelled. And Signor Nitti says it was all
because some profit hog stopped the ordinary flow of flour from the
farmer to the consumer of bread! There is, of course, the other
side. They told us in Turin that boys in their teens were found dead
back of the barricades with thousand lire notes in their pockets,
and that German agents came during the first hours of the strike
and spread money lavishly to make the riot a rebellion. Probably
this is true. The profiteer made the strike possible. It was an
opportunity for rebellion, and Germany took the opportunity. Always
she is on hand with spies to buy what she cannot honestly win.
Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to France. Yet the
journey had been well worth while. We came home with a definite
and hopeful impression about Italy. The Turin riot, bad as it was,
was not an anti-war riot. It was directed at the bad administration
of the food controller. Italy then was not an invaded country, as
France was, and had no such enthusiasm for the war, as a nation
has when its soil is invaded. Italy has that enthusiasm now for the
war. We saw that her man-power was hardly tapped. She has millions
to pour into the trenches. She needs and will need until the end
of the war, iron and coal. She will have to borrow her guns and her
fuel. But she has almost enough food. We found sugar scarce; butter
scarce, and bread sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants. We
found two meatless days a week besides Friday and found the people,
as a rule, observing them. We found the industries of the nation
turned solely toward the war. Italy realizes what defeat means.
The pro-Austrian party which was strong at the beginning of the
war has vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope has lost
his interest in peace!

But all these things are temporary; with the war's passing they
will pass. The real thing we found was an awakening people, coming
into the new century eager and wise and sure that it held somewhere
in its coming years the dawn of a new day. That really is the
hope of the war--an industrial hope, not a political hope, not a
geographical hope, but a hope for better things for the common man.
It is a hope that Christianity may take Christendom, and that the
fellowship 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, keen
longing for the Ritz--even the Ritz with its gloomy grandeur came
to me, and Henry confessed that he was glad to get back to a country
where a man could get a good refreshing bowl of onion soup! After
dinner, our first evening at the Ritz, we were looking over the
theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at
the hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie," the patrician
relative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilian
clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating
our formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would have
caught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed
aside the levity of the opening.

"Haven't you heard--haven't you heard?" she asked. And we knew
instinctively that something had happened to the Gilded Youth. And
when one is in aviation something happening always is serious. It
was Henry's kind voice that conveyed our sympathy to her. And she
told us of the accident. Two mornings before, while making his
first flight alone, from the training camp near Paris, something
went wrong with his engine while he was but a thousand feet in the
air--and over Neuilly. He had to glide down, and being over a town
he could not make a landing. They took him from the wreck of his
plane, to the hospital near by--fortunately an American Red Cross
Hospital, where the people recognized him and sent for his aunt. All
day and all night he had lain unconscious, and at noon had opened
his eyes for a minute to find his aunt beside him. "I brought with
me," said Auntie, in a tone so significantly casual that it arrested
our attention before she added, "that capable young nurse, the
first assistant--" As she spoke she caught Henry's eyes and held
him from looking at me.

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

"Yes, your pretty mid-western girl. She is with him now." Then
Auntie lost Henry's eyes as tears brimmed into her own. "It has
been twenty-six hours since we arrived at Neuilly. I shall return
in 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 to
assume. Her strong fine face lighted with something kind enough
for a smile, as she answered: "Couldn't you go out and see him? I
think 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 means
good!'" Auntie's tired eyes gathered us in again. "When you left
Landrecourt last month he told me much about the voyage over here
on the Espagne." The tired eyes left us to follow the crippled
elevator 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 aid
post and--and I know," she paused a second, pulled herself together
and continued gently. "We must face things as they are. The boy's
hours in this earth are short. He has other friends here, of course--old
friends, but you--" again she stopped. "You will appreciate why
when you see him."

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

It was nearly midnight before we came to Neuilly and stood awkwardly
beside the white cot in the little white room where the Gilded Youth
was lying. How the gilding had fallen off! All white and broken
he lay, a crushed wreck of a man, with the cluttering contrivances
of science swathing him, binding him, encasing him, holding him
miserably together while the tide of life ran out. But when he
wakened he could smile. There was real gilding in that smile, the
gilding of youth, but he only flashed his eyes upon us for a fleeting
second in turning his smile to her--to the Eager Soul, to her who
had brought some new incandescence into his life. Then we knew why
his aunt had said that we should see him. He would have us who had
witnessed the planting of the seed, know how it had flowered. His
smile told us that also. He could lift no hand to us, and could speak
but faintly. Yet his greeting held something princely in it--fine
and sweet and brave. Then he did a curious thing. He began whistling
very softly under his breath and between his teeth a queer little
tune, that reminded one oddly of the theme of Tschaicovski's
Symphony Pathetique--the first movement. As he whistled he turned
from Henry and me and looked at the Eager Soul, who smiled back
intelligently, and when she smiled he stopped. We could not understand
their signals. But whatever it was so far as it pretended to a show
of courage, we knew that it was a gorgeous bluff. In the fleeting
glance that he gave us, he told us the truth; and we knew that he
was pretending to the others that he did not know. We made some
cheerful nothings in our talk, and would have gone but he held us.
The Eager Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medicine, which
we took to be a heart stimulant; for he revived under it, and said
to 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 the
mist--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 vivid
face of the Eager Soul, in the halo of her nurse's cap. She was
exceedingly glorious, and animate and beautiful. And he was passing
into the mist, out toward death. He saw that he had got the figure
to me, and smiled. Then suddenly something came into his face from
afar, and he seemed to know that his frail craft had mounted the
out-going tide. Slowly, very slowly life began to fade from his
face. Further and further from shore the tide was bearing him. We
seemed to be on the pier. The Eager Soul even leaned forward and
put out a pretty hand, and waved at him. He signalled back with a
twitch of his lips that was meant for a smile. And then we at the
pier 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 back
into the midst of life. We were going home, and getting ready to
go home is a joyous proceeding. And there was another significance
to our packing to leave Paris. It meant something more than a
homeward journey; it meant that for the first time since we left
Wichita 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 war
draws men to it like an insatiable whirlpool. And as we came nearer
and nearer to war we had felt it swallow men into its vortex--men,
customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch
wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos--into nothing,
to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out
there on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealed
nothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the
hungry 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 of
an era. And we left them still ravening, mad and unsated. And we
were going away as dazed as we were when we came. But as we packed
our things in Paris, the thrall of it still gripped us and the
consciousness that we were leaving the war was as strong in our
hearts as the joy we felt at turning homeward. But we got aboard
the train and rode during the long lovely morning down the wide
rich valley of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy with its
steep hills which seem reflected in the sharp peaked roofs of its
chateaux, and through musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hard
to realize that modern industry was hiving. The hum of industry
seemed badly out of key in a town with a cathedral whose architectural
roots are a thousand years old, and whose streets have not yet
been veined with sewers, and whose walls are gay with the facades
of the fifteenth century. The whole face of the landscape, town and
country side, seemed to us like the back drop of the first act in
a comic opera, and we were forever listening for "The Chimes of
Normandy!" Instead we heard the noon whistle. It was tremendously
incongruous. How American humour cracks into sardonic ribaldry
at the spectacle. The French are the least bit unhappy about this
American humour. They don't entirely see it. Once outside of a
poor French village near the war zone, that had been bombed from
the German lines, bombed from the German airships and ravaged by
fire and sword, some American soldiers, looking at the desolation
and the ruin of the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, so
hopeless 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 revealed
clearer than in a flood of tears!

We came at the end of the morning "to a port in France." From there
we were to take the boat for England. And it seemed to us that the
whole place was bent on the same errand. English soldiers going home
on leave jammed the streets. They filled the hotels; they crowded
into the shops. And the whole town was made over for them. "French
Spoken Here" was the facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcard
shop near the grey old church on the main thoroughfare. It is
curious how the English put their trade mark upon the places they
occupy. These French ports filled with British soldiers look more
English than England. The English demand their own cooking, their
own merchandise, their own tobacco, their own beer--which is stale,
flat and unprofitable enough these days--and they demand their
native speech. When he gets in sight of his native land the British
Tommy quits saying "Donny mo-i, de tabac! Ma'mselle!" But bellows
forth both loud and long, "I say, Lizz, gimme some makin's! and
look alive, please!" So when we went to bed in our boat in a French
port, and slept through a submarine zone, and waked up in an English
port, there was no vast difference in the places. Today Southampton
and Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for there the English
do most congregate. But back of the French ports it is all France,
and back of the English ports is England, and worlds lie between
them. England, as one rides through it who lives beyond the seas,
and uses the English tongue, always must seem like the unfolding of
an old, old dream. England gives her step-children the impression
that they have seen it all before! And they have; in Mother Goose,
in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, in the songs
of British poets, in the landscapes of British artists! At every
turn of the road, in every face at the window, in every hedgerow
and rural village is the everlasting reminder that we who speak
the English tongue are bound with indissoluble links of our foster
memories from the books and the arts, to ways of thinking and
living and growing in grace that we call English. It is more than
a blood or breed, more even than a civilization, is this spiritual
inheritance that comes from this English soil; it is the realization
in life of a philosophy, the dramatization of a human creed.
It may be understood, but not defined, yet it is as palpable and
substantial in this earth as any material fact. Germany knows what
this English philosophy means; and for half a century Germany has
been preparing to combat it. Napoleon knew it, and believed in
it, when he declared three-fourths of every fact is its spiritual
value. France has it, new Russia is struggling for it. American
life has it as an ancient inheritance, and as we Americans rode
through the green meadows of England up from the coast to London,
for ever reviewing familiar scenes and faces and aspects of life
that we had never seen before, we realized how much closer than
blood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed.
So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary when
we were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishman
about something a speaker had said in parliament the day before.
We may love the French, like the ladies, God bless 'em! But we
quarrel only with the English.

When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through the
grey old streets, surface differences between London and the other
capitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts.
These differences marked the different reactions of personal loss
upon 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's
sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France. But England's
master passion in this war is pride. "In proud and loving memory"
is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituary
notices of those who have died for England. Ambassador Page tells
this: He was asking a British matron about her family, severally,
and when he inquired about the son, she replied, "Haven't you
heard of the new honour that has come to us through him?" And to
her friend's negative she returned: "He has been called upon to die
for England!" Now that seems rather French in its dramatics than
British. Yet it reflects exactly the British attitude. The women wear
no mourning. They do not go about in bright colours by any means.
Bright colours in the war distinguish the men. But the women do wear
dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutral
tints of various hues. The shop windows of London are bright. There
is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, "Business
as usual." The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs,
and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of
London, prove that London still is a great city--the greatest city
in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it
is, cannot overcome London, entirely. Something of the fact that
she is the world's metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhat
apart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the London
consciousness, 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 uniform
than in Paris. And the Londoners one does see, all appear to be
hurrying about war work. But it is the women constantly in evidence
who have changed the face of London. Women keep the shops, conduct
the busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats
of the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweep
the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggage
at the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters,
superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens before
forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass on farms, herd
sheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of the
world's work that man has ever done. Now, of course, women are
doing these things elsewhere in the world. But London and England
are man's domain. It seems natural to see the French women, and even
the Italian women at work. Man is more or less the leisure class
on the continent. But London is a man's town if on earth there is
one, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and baffling
sight.

Of course the men are not all dead--"they're just away." And
they come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal,
and there is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its normal
function. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moral
break-down among the women of England. In England we were asked
about the dreadful things that were happening in France. The things
that were happening in France were not essentially evil things. One
could imagine that if God thinks war is necessary for the solution
of the world's terrible problems, He will have no trouble forgiving
these lapses that follow in the wake of war in France. And in
England, similarly we found that the moral break-down was not a
moral break-down at all. The abnormal relation of the sexes arising
out of war produced somewhat the same results that one found in
France, but in different ways. In France too many strange men are
billeted in the houses of the people. In England, too many homes
are without men at all. And sheer social lonesomeness produces in
humanity about the same conditions that arise when people are thrown
in too close contact. There is a sort of social balance of nature,
wherein normally desirable results are found. The girl working in
the munition factories, working at top speed eight hours a day,
filled with a big emotional desire to do her full duty to her
country every second of the day, finds it easy in her eight hours
of rest to fall in love with a soldier who is going out to offer
his life for the country for which she is giving her strength
so gladly. She is not a light woman. She is moved by deep and
beautiful emotions. And if a marriage before he goes out to fight
is inconvenient or impossible--the war made it so, and God will
understand. Of course the idle woman, the vain woman, the foolish
woman in these times in England finds ample excuse for her folly
and vast opportunity to indulge her folly in the social turmoil of
the war. And she is going the pace. Her men are gone, who restrain
her, and she has nothing in her head or her heart to hold, and she
is in evidence. Her type always exaggerates its importance, and
fools people into thinking that her name is Legion, and that Mr.
Legion is an extensive polygamist, with a raft of daughters and
sisters and cousins and aunts. But she is small in numbers and she
is not important. She is merely conspicuous, and the moral break-down
in 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 a
green uniform with a crimson voile boudoir cap and as the American
stepped inside the slow-going car, she answered his "good morning"
with a respectful, "good morning, sir." Being a good traveller, it
seemed to me wise to prepare to while away the tedium of the long
easy journey to the fourth floor with a friendly chat.

"Any of your relatives in the war?" This from me by way of an
ice-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 they
can teach him some kind of a trade there, sir," answered the woman.

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

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

"Two, sir," she answered as the elevator approached the mezzanine
floor, "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 office
and he'll have a fine chance to rise there. You must give them an
education--a good one; send them to College. If they're going to
get on in this new world they will need every ounce of education
you can stuff into them. But it will be a splendid thing for both
of 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 to
the university, is absolutely free. The state does the whole business
and in my state they print the school books, and more than that they
give a man a professional education, too, without tuition fees--if
he wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or a chemist
or a school teacher!"

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

"Well, it will come. That's the next revolution you want to start
when you women get the ballot. Abolish these class schools like
Eton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. All
the kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section of
the country go to the common schools. Children should start life
as equals. There is no snobbery so cruel as the snobbery that marks
off childhood into classes! When you women vote here, the first
thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime keep
the kids in school."

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

"Go to it, sister, and luck to you," cried her passenger as he rose
from 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--good
morning," she said as he turned down the corridor. The "sir" had
left entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the women
of Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtains
in Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping the
servile "sir" and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as
human beings.

It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely
martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman
question as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry,
who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but
particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is
forming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the European
woman 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 of
a mediaeval room, "are of two kinds: Those who are being crucified
by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which
war has brought them!"

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

"Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary," purred the lady at
the embassy. "They come and go, but the whole trouble with this
new situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of the
crucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never again
can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions
from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The
cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest
product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American
level."

"And the continental mistress system," prodded her American
interviewer, ironically, "will it, too, disappear with the departed
superiority of continental womanhood?"

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

"Americanized?" the middle western eyebrows went up, and possibly
the middle western voice flinched a little. But the wise dowager
from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Central
bonds, continued bitterly: "Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. The
continental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that you
middle class Americans think it is. Of course there are European
men who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few months
or a few years and forget her. Such men are impossible."

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

"But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-product
of a leisure class. Men and women marry for business reasons. The
women have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, and
clings to her for a lifetime. He cannot afford to marry her--even
if 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 a
beautiful life-long friendship is thus cherished. It will disappear
when men have to work, and when women may go into the world to work
without losing their social positions. And this new order, this
making the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will rob
civilization of its most perfect flower--the cultivated woman who
has developed under the shelter of our economic system. I might as
well shock your bourgeois morals now as later. So listen to this.
Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering. I talked
to a French mother this morning. Her income is gone--part of it
taxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in Northern
France. Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. In this
chaos 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 he
is looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up a
fool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant's salary. And
the weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her son
should have no mistress as to have a fool! For a man's mistress does
make such a difference in his life! My friend is almost willing
to let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work! The world
never will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring in
this war!"

Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe which
Henry gave when he heard it. He was trying to tell a Duchess about
prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas or
prohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard of
both. But Henry's other ear was open to what the embassy ornament
was saying to me. On the other side of this record of the swan song
of the lady of the embassy is this record. It is a man's voice. The
man has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a place
where as manager of the London factory of an American concern, he
works several hundred employees.

"Say, let me tell you something--never again! Never again for mine
do 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 we
thought that only men could handle--never again. And when they come
back these men will have to work under women foremen. We thought
when the war took our men bosses away that we should have to close
the shop. But say--never again, I tell you. And let me give you a
pointer. You wouldn't know them girls. When the war broke out they
were getting ten shillings--about $2.50 a week, the best of 'em,
and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, and
every once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls had
a great joke about her--you know. And they would soak the shop
whenever 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 the
product, and they'd lie--why, man, the whole works would stand up
and lie for each other against the shop. It took five men to boss
them where we have one woman doing it now. And say, it ain't the
woman boss that's done it. We pay 'em more. Them same girls is
getting ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now--Lawsee, man--you
ought to see 'em! Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!
Goddlemighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that same measly bunch
of 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 believed
ten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it's sure done
it."

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

"Search me, Cap--I give it up. I just only know what I know and
see what I see. And never again--you hear me, man--never again does
our shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made
a 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 in
Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon
the destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knows
woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward
a 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 we
talked of these things. There are two Henrys--one, the owner of a
ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable
newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To me
this was his greatest charm--this infinite variety of Henrys that
was forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beacon
building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my
theories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellowship
with men in the new democratization of the world. He refused to see
the democratization of the world in the war. To him the war meant
adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments of
political and commercial influence on the map of the world. But
to the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many times
setting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing away
his political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man
would toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something more
than its military expression.

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

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

As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Its
emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: "Well, Bill,
I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her
worth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to the
public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it
is 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 to
wondering how the Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and we thought
of the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love and
death and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden
among the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier or
doctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped to
the floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly they had
dropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul. He opened
one and remarked:

"Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here on the margin, 'Verses
by our Doctor friend. I thought you'd like to see them. See other
sheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he tried to whistle
that night. He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor's words.'"
Then Henry unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, was
the air, evidently copied by the girl from the melody written by
the Gilded Youth. And clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovski
melody from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, that dominated
the air.[Footnote: For the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote to
the Young Doctor's verses the reader should see appendix "A."] The
fine thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that air back to
her, 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 rhymes
as 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 the
room in Buckland's hotel across twenty years, down an elm-shaded
path in the little town of Baldwin, Kansas--thousands of miles and
seemingly 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 his
twenties ought to go singing, with one voice or another, after such
a girl!"

And then we knew what the Young Doctor was doing there in the garden
among the adoring flowers. He was writing those verses. And, we
in our forties, after such things have passed, were sitting in a
commonplace room in a comfortable hotel, five hundred miles from the
battle and twenty years from the primrose path, trying to imagine
it all. And like Stephen Blackpool in Dickens' "Hard Times" about
all we could make of it was that it was a mess! They were both so
remote, the love affair that had followed us over Europe, and the
war which we had followed so wearily. The love affair was of course
a look backward, for us, to days "when lutes were touched and songs
were 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 things
askew, does proceed in England calmly, and in something like order.
As we looked back upon our London experience it seemed to Henry
and me that we were hurrying from luncheons to teas and teas to
dinners and from dinners to the second act of good shows all the
time. For in London we had no Red Cross duties. We were on our way
home, and people were kind to us, and best of all we could speak
the language--after a fashion--and understand in a general way
what was going on. We had dined at two American embassies on the
continent and had worn our tail coats. Of course Red Cross uniforms
were proper evening regalia at any social function. But someway a
flannel 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 that
way and we couldn't come to it. So we wore our tails. We noticed in
France and Italy that other men wore dinner coats, and we bemoaned
our stupidity in bringing our tails and leaving our dinner coats
in New York. We fancied in our blindness that on the continent no
one noticed the difference. But in England, there doubt disappeared.
Whenever we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some English
ladyship through a lorgnette or a spyglass of some kind gave us
the once-over with the rough blade of her social disapproval and
we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party
and dropped into a grand ball. But we couldn't help it. How should
we have known, without our wives to pack our trunks for us in New
York, that tails had atrophied in European society and that uniforms
and dinner coats had taken their place.

But other things have disappeared from Great Britain since
war began, and Henry was doomed to walk the island vainly looking
for the famed foods of old England. All through Italy and France,
where onion soup and various pastes were served to us, Henry ate
them, but in a fond hope that when we got to England he would have
some of the "superior comestibles" which a true lover of Dickens
had a right to expect. The French were given to ragouts and Latin
translations of Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered in
onions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy green groceries,
and these messed dishes irritated Henry. He is the kind of an
old-fashioned man who likes to take his food straight. If he eats
onions, he demands that they shall be called onions, or if they serve
him carrots, he must know specifically that he is eating carrots,
and he wants his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and no
nonsense about it. Similarly he wants his veal served by itself, and
when 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! So
all over the continent he was bragging about what he was going to
do to "the roast beef of old England," and was getting ready for
Yorkshire pudding with it. It was sweet to hear Henry's honest
bark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep-mouthed welcome to Sam
Weller's "'am and weal pie," and even Pickwick's "chops and tomato
sauce," and David Copperfield's toasted muffins, as we drew near
the chalk cliffs of England. Also he was going to find what an "eel
pie" was, and he had a dozen Dickensonian dishes that he proposed
to explore, dishes whose very names would make a wooden Indian's
mouth water. But when he got there the cupboard was bare. England
was going on rations. Fats were scarce, sugars were rare, starches
were controlled by the food board. And who could make a currant
tart without these? He dropped two bullet-sized brown biscuits with
a hazelnut of butter under his vest the first three minutes of our
first breakfast and asked for another round, after he had taken
mine.

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

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

He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; that was his allowance
of sugar. We went out to lunch. Henry ordered the roast beef of old
England at the best club in London and got a pink shaving, escorted
in by two boiled potatoes and a hunk of green cabbage, boiled
without salt or pork. And for dessert we had a sugarless, lardless
whole-wheat-flour tart! It puckered his mouth like a persimmon. It
fell to me to explain to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon,
that Henry had just come from the continent, where he had scorned
the food, and one could see from the twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes
that he was going to put Henry in a book. And he certainly was
a hero during those London days--the hero of a great disillusion.
Of course the British cooking was good. The English are splendid
cooks, and they were doing their best; but Henry's picture of the
great boar's head triumphantly borne into the hall on the shoulders
of four stout butlers, and his notion of the blazing plum pudding
as large as a hassock, and his preconceived idea of England as
Dickens's fat boy forever stuffing and going to sleep again, had to
be entirely revised. For if the English are proud of the way they
conceal the bitterness of their sorrow in this war, also they have
a vast pride in the way they are sacrificing their creature comforts
for it. In Latin countries there is more or less special privilege.
But in England, the law is the law and men glory in its rigours
by obeying it in proud self-sacrifice. If our dinners sometimes
were Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, refreshing and
filling. We, however, had some trouble with our "Who's Who." One
evening they sat me opposite a handsome military man who talked of
airships and things most wonderfully and it took me three days to
learn that he was the authority on air fighting in Europe! He was
a Lord of somewhere, and Earl of something and a Duke of somewhat--all
rolled into one. Henry hooted at me for two days. But finally he
gave me some comfort. "At least," he said, "you are as well-known
in London as your Duke's mixture is in Emporia, and London is a
bigger town!" Then it came Henry's turn. At our very grandest dinner
they sat Henry between Lord Bryce and one of the most distinguished
men of contemporary English letters. Henry shone that night as he
never shone before and when Henry turns on his talk he is a wizard.
Meredith Nicholson, who has heard Henry talk at a dinner, in a
recent number of Scribner's magazine, said of him: "He's the best
talker I've ever heard. It was delightful to listen to discourse so
free, so graphic in its characterization, so coloured and flavoured
with the very soil," and that night at the English dinner, all
of Henry's cylinders were hitting and he took every grade without
changing gears. But my ears were eager for the man on Henry's right.
He told some stories; my neck craned toward them. Henry returned
the 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 they
called Barrie!"

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

"Henry, Henry, have you never heard of 'Peter Pan,' nor 'The Little
Minister,' 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 him
all evening braying like a jack. Bill--Bill, you won't ever tell
this in Wichita, will you?"

So it must remain forever a secret!

That was a joyful hour for me, but the next day, Henry had his
laugh. We came in from tea and found a card on the table in the
snug little room near the elevator, which passes for a hotel office
in London. The card was from Lord Bryce inviting us to tea the
next afternoon. It fell to Henry's lot to go out for the day in
the country, and to me to lunch with Granville Barker. So half-past
four saw me rushing into the hotel from a taxi, which stood waiting
outside, and throbbing up a two-pence every minute. Then this
dialogue 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, and
the chug of that taxi by the door moved me impulsively toward the
elevator. But the elevator was still three steps away, when the
manager of the hotel sauntered out from a side door, looked me over
leisurely, 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 my
lips replied, "Yes--yes--say--Do you know whether Mr. Allen is in
our room? It is getting late and he must hurry or--"

The manager continued to look me over still leisurely, then he
smiled persuasively, but spoke firmly; realizing that something
would 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, while
Henry stood by and chortled in ghoulish Wichita glee!

But if we made a rather poor fist of our social diversions, at
least we had a splendid time at the London shows. And then there
was always the prospect of an exciting adventure getting home after
the performance was over. The hotel generally found a taxi which
took us to the theater. But once there we had to skirmish for
ourselves and London is a big town, and hundreds of thousands of
Londoners are hunting taxis at eleven at night, and they are hard
to catch. So we generally had the fun of walking back to Brook Street
in the dark. And it is dark in London toward midnight. Paris is
merely gloomy. Rome is a bit somber, but London is as black as the
inside of your hat. For London has been bombed and bombed by the
German airmen, until London in the prevailing mist which threatens
fog becomes mere murk. Night after night we wandered the crooked
streets inquiring our way of strangers, some of whom were worse lost
than we; one night we took a Londoner in charge and piloted him to
Leicester Square; and then got lost ourselves finding Piccadilly
and Regent Street! So that whenever we went out after dinner we were
never without dramatic excitement, even if it was not adequately
supplied by the show. The London taste in shows seems to sheer
away from the war. In the autumn last past but two shows had a
war motive: One "General Post," a story of the fall of caste from
English life during the war, telling how a tailor became a general;
the other "The Better 'Ole," a farce comedy, with a few musical
skits in it, staged entirely "at the front." "The Better 'Ole"
could be put on in any American town and the fun would raise the
roof! There is no story to it; the show is but a series of dialogues
to illustrate Bairnsfather's cartoons.

[Illustration: "Well now, Sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown
shoes 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, while
the bombs are crashing over him, and dirt threatens to bury him. A
comrade looks in and to his captious remarks the squatting soldier
answers, "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, and
Bert says, "Alf--we'll miss this old war wen it's over!" As the
shells strike nearer and nearer and a great crater yawns at their
feet they crawl into it, are all but buried alive by the dirt from
another shell, and Bert exclaims, "Say, Alf, scare me--I got the
'iccoughs!" And so it goes for a whole evening, while Bert, making
love to an interminable string of girls at each place where he is
billeted at the front, gives away scores of precious lockets with
his mother's hair in them, and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, to
make his cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of his wife
at home who keeps a "pub"!

The prohibitionist in America would probably insist that she keep
a soda fountain or a woman's exchange; but no other alterations
would be needed to get the play over the footlights in any English
speaking 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 the
game with death, which is really Shakespearean in its directness
and its horse play--like the talk of the soldiers in "Henry IV" or
the chaffing of the grave-diggers in "Hamlet," or the common people
in any of Shakespeare's plays, offends the British home-staying
sense of propriety, and old ladies and gentlemen write to the Times
about it. But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl their
approval.

Curiously enough in musical programs one finds no prejudice against
German music in London as one finds it in Paris. To get Beethoven
in Paris one had to lower the windows, close the shutters, pull down
the shades and pin the curtains tight. At the symphony concerts in
London one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wagner, who is almost
modern in his aggressive Teutonism. But the English have little
music of their own, and so long as they have to be borrowing they
seem to borrow impartially of all their neighbours, the French,
the Slavs, the Germans, and the Italians. Indeed, even when British
opinion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Symphony Orchestra
put in an afternoon with Tschaicovsky's Fourth Symphony. And yet
if, in a few months we could form even a vague notion of the public
minds of England, and of France, one might say that England seemed
more implacable than France. In France, where one heard no music but
French and Italian music in the concerts, at the parks, in opera,
one heard a serious discussion going on among school teachers about
the 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, of
pillaged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down to their very
milestones! 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. Our
children will have to live with Germany, and our children's children
to the end of time. War is a horrible thing. Hate breeds war. Why
not then let the story of this war and its barbarities die with
this generation? Why should we for ever breed hate into the heart
of our people to grow eternally into war?"

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

But the things that roll off the laps of the gods, after humanity
has put its destinies there, sometimes are startlingly different
from the expected fruits of victory. We fight a war for one thing,
win the war and get quite another thing. The great war now waging
began 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 the
war. But boundaries and markets will fluctuate with the decades
and centuries. The important changes that will come out of this
war--assuming that the Allies win it--will be found in the changed
relations of men. The changes will be social and economic and they
will be institutional and lasting. For generally speaking, such
changes as approach a fair adjustment of the complaints of the "have
nots" against the "haves" in life, are permanent changes. Kings,
overlords, potentates, politicians, capitalists, high priests--masters
of various kinds--find it difficult to regain lost privileges and
perquisites. And in this war Germany stands clearly for the "haves."
If Germany wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all over
the world. For the same autocracy in Berlin lives in Wall Street,
and in the "city" in London, and in the caste and class interests
of Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany alone among the nations
of the earth rests on the divine right of kings that is the last
resort of privilege. In America we have the democratic weapons to
break up our plutocracy whenever we desire to do so. In England
they are breaking up their caste and economic privileged classes
rapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a motheaten relic. And
when junkerdom in Germany is crushed, then at least the world may
begin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself free. In the
lands of the Allies the autocracy will be weakened by an allied
victory. In Germany the junkers will be strong if they win the
war, and their strength will revive junkerism all over the earth.
If the Allies win, it will weaken junkerdom everywhere. Germany, it
is true, treats her working classes better than some of the Allies
treat their working people. But it is with the devilish wisdom of
a wise slaveholder, who sees profit in fat slaves. The workers get
certain legal bonuses. They have economic privileges, not democratic
rights of free men under German rule. And the roaring of the big
guns out at the front, seemed to Henry and me to be the crashing
walls of privilege in the earth.

Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one sees
and hears in Europe may pass with the dawn of peace--woman, for
instance, may return indoors and come out only on election day,
yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment have
come to stay. They are the most important salvage that will come
out of the wreck and waste of this war. In England, for instance,
the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes. They provide
virtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for women
over thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided for
men. So revolutionary are the political changes in England that
after the war, it is expected--conceded is hardly too strong a
word, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalition
cabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet. Certainly if labour does
not actually dominate the British government, labour will control
it indirectly. And the labour gains during the war will not be
lost. Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the allied
countries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not by
competitive rates. "The labour market" has passed with the slave
market. Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, but
upon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence.
This change, of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order in the
world. And the labour party of England recently adopted a program
which provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen,
independent of the "labour market," but also provides for the
democratic 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 party
include the permanent control of the prices of all the necessaries
of life, without relation to profits and independent of supply and
demand. Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis.
Labour demands that they be done permanently. And still further to
press home its claims upon society, British labour demands a system
of taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bring
their incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above the
common level--a rise in some relation to the actual differences of
mind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a difference
based on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing. It is, of
course, revolution. But Labour now has political rights in England,
and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in every
part of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather
determined, and probably will have its way. In France and in Italy
where for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlled
assemblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the English
are being made.

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

For conditions in this war are new in the world. In every other
war, soldiers have dreamed high dreams of their rewards. But they
have not taken them--chiefly because their dreams were impractical,
somewhat because the dreams that were practical were not held by a
majority; or to some extent because if they were held by a majority
the majority had no power. Now--even Henry admitted this is no
mere theory--we have a new condition. In Europe for two decades
the labour problem has been carefully thought out. Labour is in a
numerical majority and the majority has political power and political
purpose. Labour has been asking and getting about the same things
in every country. It has been asking and getting a broader political
control in order to assume a firmer economic control. But one day
we read in the London papers of an incident that indicated how far
the state control of industry has gone in England. A strike occurred
and an important industry was threatened--not over wages, not over
hours, not over shop conditions, but over the recognition of the
union. Pig-headed managing directors stood firm against recognizing
the unions. Then the government stepped in and settled the strike
and has compelled the owners of the plant to remove the managing
director and to put in men satisfactory to the workers! Labour now
is beginning all over Europe to formulate a demand for a place in
the directorate of industries. This place in the directorate of
industries is demanded that labour may have an intelligent knowledge
of the profits of a business so that labour honestly may share those
profits with capital. That this condition is coming in Europe no
one will deny who sees the rush of events toward a redistribution
of 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 motived
by the great shadow that is hanging over the world--the shadow of
public debt in this war. Someone must pay that debt. Heretofore
war debts have fallen heaviest upon the poor. Those least able to
pay have paid the most. But those least able to pay are coming out
of 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 to
be over-taxed. During our visit to the front the soldiers were
forever saying to Henry and me: "We have offered our lives. Those
who stayed at home must give up their riches." And as we went
about in England we were always hearing about the wisdom of a heavy
confiscatory tax. Among the conservatives themselves who presumably
have a rather large share of the national wealth, there is a
serious feeling that immediately after the war a tax-measure should
be passed which would at once confiscate a certain portion of the
property of the country--one hears different per cents discussed;
some declare that ten per cent is enough, while others hold that it
will require 25 per cent. This confiscatory tax is to be collected
when any piece of property changes hands, and the accruing sum
is to be used for paying off the national debt, or a considerable
portion of it at once. The situation is completely changed from that
which followed the Napoleonic wars, where war taxes fell largely
upon labour. So in self-preservation, capital is considering
turning over a part of its property to the state to avoid the slow
and disintegrating grind that otherwise inevitably must come.

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

One of the corroborating proofs that this is after all not a king's
war, but a people's war, is found in the kind of stories they
were forever telling Henry and me about the war. They are not hero
stories. Mostly they are funny stories, more or less gently guying
the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war," for it is the proud
boast of the British army that this is a noncoms' war. Doubtless
the stories have small basis in fact, but the currency of these
blithe stories reflects the popular mind. Thus they say that when
General Haig and his staff came down to review the Canadian troops
and pin a carload of hardware on their men for bravery in battle,
medals of one sort and another, the Canadian General lined his
huskies up, and as the staff approached he cried anxiously, "Say,
boys--here he comes. Now see if you can't stand to attention, and
for Heaven's sake, fellows, don't call me Bill while he is here!"
And then they say that after the heavy hardware and shelf goods
were distributed a British officer lifted his voice to say: "Men,
you have written a brave page upon our history. No more splendid
courage than yours ever has been known in the annals of our proud
race. But with such magnificent courage, why can you not display
other soldierly qualities. Why are you so loose in your discipline?
Why don't you treat your officers with more respect?" And in the
pause 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 current
smoking room fiction relates that last spring after a troop of
French soldiers had been hauled out to be shot for refusing to go
into battle under orders, a whole division revolted and demanded
new officers--and got new officers--before they would move forward.
And the same smoking room fiction says that in the revolt the men
were right and the officers wrong.

"Why," asked a new English officer of some Russian troops who had
made 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 was
made?" The noncom grinned and answered, "We were taking a vote upon
the matter of the charge, sir!"

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

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

The Italians have high hopes of harnessing their nine millions of
horsepower in Alpine water-falls, running their state-owned railroads
and public utilities with it, and introducing electricity as
an industrial power into Italian homes, thus bringing back to the
homes of the people the home industries like weaving which steam
took away a century ago. But this is only a dream. Yet sometimes
dreams do come true. And dreams are wishes unexpressed; and in this
clay of democratic power, a wish with a ballot behind it becomes
a will, and soon hardens into a fact. The times are changing. But
of course human nature remains much the same. Men under a given
environment will do about the same kind of things under one set of
circumstances. But we should not forget in our computations that
laws, customs, traditions, the distribution of wealth, make an
entirely new environment, and that circumstances are not the same
when environment differs. That the surroundings of those people known
collectively as "the poor" have changed, and changed permanently
by the war, no one who sees them in Europe can doubt. They are
well-fed, well-housed, and are determined to be well-educated.
They know that they can use their ballots to get their share of
the wealth they produce. They are never going to be content again
with crusts. They are motived now by hope rather than by fear, and
they are going to react strangely during the next ten years on the
social structure of this old world. But even the new majority will
not change everything of course. Grass will grow, water will run
down hill, smart men will lead fools, wise men will have the places
of honour and power, in proportion to the practicality of their
wisdom. But for all that, we shall have in a rather large and
certainly in a keenly interesting degree a new heaven and a new
earth.

Now as these speculations upon the new order came to us as our journey
drew to its close in England, the war seemed slowly to change its
meaning. It became something more than a conflict; it seemed to be
a 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 side
of the German curtain at the "front" which we knew, a democratic
purpose is doing these things. The view of that democratic purpose
at work, to me at least, was my chief trophy of the war. The laws
which make food conservation possible, which direct shipping,
mobilize railroads, control industry, regulate wages, prescribe
many of the habits of life to fit the war, all rise out of the
experience of the people. There is a vast amount of the "consent
of the governed" in this whole war game, so far as the Allies are
concerned. And as it is in democratic finance, so also is it in
the taste and talent and capacity for war. That also is democratic.
What a wide range of human activity is massed in this business of
war!

For days and days after we left the continent, in our minds we could
see armies moving into the trenches somewhere along the "far flung
battle line," and other armies moving out. The picture haunted us.
It seemed to me a cinematograph of democracy. For the change of an
army division from the trenches, tired, worn and bedraggled, moving
wearily to its station of rest, with another army division, fresh
and eager, moving up from its station of rest to the front, is indeed
a social miracle. It is a fine bit of human machinery. So in terms
of our modern democracy it may be well to review the interminable
panorama of this democratic war. Fifty years ago it would have been
a memorable achievement. Waterloo itself was not such a miracle. Yet
somewhere in this war, this wonder is done every day and no record
is made of it. Imagine hundreds of miles of wide, white roads,
hard-surfaced and graded for the war, leading to a sector of
the 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 the
hills; another never-ceasing procession with its martial impedimenta
coming out of the hills to rest. A few horses hauling big gun
carriages 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 goose
step, comes swinging along carrying their shovels at a martial
angle--road menders--which proves that we are more than thirty
kilos from the firing line; now and then a camp-kitchen rattles
past. But ever in one's ears is the rich rumble of trucks, recalling
the voluptuous sound of the circus wagon on the village street.
But always there are two great circus parades, one going up, one
coming down. Lumbering trucks larger than city house-moving vans
whirl by in dust clouds; long--interminably long--lines of these
trucks creak, groan and rumble by. Some of the trucks are mysteriously
non-committal as to their contents--again reproducing the impression
of the circus parade. Probably they hide nothing more terrible
than tents or portable ice plants. But most of the trucks that go
growling 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 cheerful
men--private soldiers hurrying about the business of war; to their
trenches or from their trenches, but always cheerful. Sometimes
a staff officer's car, properly caparisoned, shuttles through the
line like a flashing needle; sometimes a car full of young officers
of the line tries to nose ahead of the men of the regiment, but
rather 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 great
gun festively named, as for instance, "The Siren," or "Baby" or
"The Peach" or "The Cooing Dove." Curious snaky looking objects
all covered with wiggly camouflage--some artist's pride--are these
guns, and back of them or in front of them and around them, clank
huge empty ammunition wagons going out, or heavy ones coming in. At
short intervals along the road are repair furnaces, and near them
a truck or a gun carriage, or an ambulance that has turned out for
slight repairs. In the village are great stores of gasoline and
rubber, huge quantities of it assembled by some magic for the hour's
urgent need.

What a marvel of organization it is; no confusion, no distraught
men, no human voice raised except in ribald song. From the ends of
the earth have come all these men, all these munitions, all this
food and tents and iron and steel and rubber and gas and oil. And
there it centers for the hour of its need on this one small sector
of the front; indeed on every small sector of the long, long trail,
these impedimenta of war come hurrying to their deadly work. And
it is not one man; not one nation even, not one race, nor even one
race kindred that is assembling this endless caravan of war. It
is a spirit that is calling from the vasty deep of this world's
treasure, unto material things to rise, take shape and gather at
this tryst with death. It is the spirit of democracy calling across
the world. The supreme councils of the Allies--what are they? They
change, form and reform. Generals, field marshals, staff officers
in gold lace, cabinets, presidents, puppet kings, and God knows
what of those who strut for a little time in their pomp of place and
power--what are they but points on the drill of the great machine
whose power is the people of the world, struggling in protest
against despotism, privilege, autocracy and the pretence of the few
to play greedily at the master game. The points break off, or are
worn off--what difference does it make? Joffre, French, Cardona,
Neville, Asquith, Painleve, Kitchener, Haig--the drill never
ceases; the power behind it never falters. For once in the world
the spirit of democracy is organized; organized across lines of
race, of language, of national boundary! A score of million men, in
arms, 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 fumbling
hands and slow brains, teachers, preachers, philosophers, poets,
thieves, harlots, saints and sinners--all the free people of the
world, giving what talents Heaven has bestowed upon them to make the
power 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 can
rise to a divine dignity of courage and sacrifice. And that knowledge
is the great salvage of this war. More than written laws, more
than justice established, more than wrongs righted in any nation,
and in all the nations will be the knowledge of this latent power
of men!




CHAPTER IX

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


We found when we were leaving England another of those curious
contrasts between the nations of the earth that one meets in a long
journey. Coming into Bordeaux we were convoyed for three hours by
a 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 sudden
deaths and hairbreadth escapes which had happened while we slept.
We sailed into the Gironde River peacefully, almost joyously. But
we left the Mersey with a story that a big fleet of destroyers
hovered at the river's mouth; that the Belgic had been beached
out there on a shoal by a "sub," and that we would be lucky if our
throats were not cut in the water as we tried to swim ashore after
we 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 British
liner is the favourite food of von Tirpetz! They even showed us
his teeth marks on our American liner, the New York. On an earlier
trip during the summer of 1917 the boat had been torpedoed when
Admiral Sims was a passenger, going to England. The Admiral was
sitting at dinner when the explosion occurred and the force of it
threw him to the high ceiling of the dining saloon! At least that's
what they told us. Caution and conflicting doubts, "fears within
and 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 conduct
of the ship's officers, as compared with the French seamen, but in
the ship's company, going to war and coming away from it. We went
with youth; the Espagne was crowded with young men going to war,
with young women going out to serve those who were salvaging the
waste of war. The boat carried a score of lovers--some married, some
impromptu, some incidental and fleeting, but all vastly interesting.
For when the new wine blooms the old ferments, and stumbling over
the dark decks at night on the Espagne, we were forever running
into youth paired off and gazing at the mystery of the ocean and
the stars. So the corks were always popping in our old hearts; and
we enjoyed it. But we paced the black night decks of the New York
as "one who treads alone a banquet hall deserted." We were among
the younger people on the ship. There was no youth to play with
under thirty! No one touched the piano. No one lifted his voice
in song. The most devilish thing going as we sailed was a game of
chess! There was a night game of whist or cribbage or some other
sedentary game, which closed at ten, and after that in the library
the talk sagged and died like a decomposed chord in a Tschaikovsky
symphony! It was sad! One had to go to the smoking room where there
was wassail on lemon squash and insipid English beer until after
midnight. But there the talk was good. Of course it sometimes
bore a strong smell of man about it, but it was virile and wise. A
rug dealer from Odessa, a dealer in mining machinery from Moscow,
a Chicago college professer returning from Petrograd, a cigarette
maker from Egypt, a brace of British naval officers going over to
return with Canadian transports, an American aerial engineer, back
from an inspection trip to France, a great English actor, who once
played Romeo with Mary Andersen--to give one an approximate of his
age--a Red Cross commission from Italy, and an Australian premier.
The whole ship's company was but thirty-four first class and of
these but six were women. It was no place for dashing young blades
in their late forties like Henry and me.

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

"Who was this Gilded Youth?" asked Henry.

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

"And the Eager Soul?" quoth he.

"She, dearly beloved, was the ideal of our boyish hearts. Did
you ever have a red-headed sweetheart in those olden golden days,
Henry?" He shook a sad head in retrospection. "Nor did one ever
come to me. But most boys want one sometime, so I took her off
the Red Cross Posters and breathed the breath of life into her. And
isn't she a peach; and doesn't she kind of warm your heart and make
up 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, very
shy 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 Saens
on the Espagne, and did the funny stunt at the auction; there was
the night we sat on the food box near the front at Douaumont and
heard the ambulance boy whistling the bit from "Thais," far up the
hill in the misty moonlight; there was the French soldier by the
splintered tree in the Forest of Hess; there was the head nurse
killed by the abri between Souilly and Verdun, who waited while
her girls went in; there was the poor dying boy in the hospital
for whom you bought the flowers and there was the handsome New
York woman coming over to start her hospital. There was the young
doctor whom the German officer prisoner tried to kill. And there
was the picture of the red-headed Red Cross nurse, and there were
our 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 old
always happy? It is in passing through life from one to the other
that our courage fails and our hearts sadden. And these phantoms
are of such stuff as dreams are made of and they may not falter
or grow weary, or grow old. Youth always has a happy ending--even
in death. It is when youth ends in life that we may question its
happiness."

And so we left our fancies and walked to the big guns far forward
and gazed into the sunset, where home lay, home, and the things
that 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!







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