And these few words of newspaper type, which nobody else seemed to be noticing, somehow—­as if one had stubbed one’s toe—­disturbed the picture.  They did not fit in with the rakish gray motor-car, labelled “Australia,” I saw after dinner, nor the young infantryman I ran across on a street corner who had been in the fighting ever since Mons and was but down “for a rest” before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and buzzing cafes.  But across them, for some reason, all evening, one couldn’t help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, of Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, singing “Deutschland uber Alles!” and wondering what he might be thinking about the great game of war fifteen years from now.

While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North Sea.  The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business.  Why couldn’t people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?

Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies’ bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly.  The ambulance is as hard to get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed embassies, making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike delight in the novelty of work.  This young man wore a Red Cross button now and paused long enough to impart the following—­characteristic of the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not, help to “make life interesting”: 

1.  An English general just down from the front had told him that four thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand Germans.

2.  In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian wounded were put in the same ward.  In the night the Indians got up and cut the Germans’ throats.

I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the higher part of the town.  It was pleasant up here in the frosty morning—­old houses, archways, and courts, and the bells tolling people to church.

Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black and silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black coats and black-and-silver cocked hats.  People stopped as they passed, a woman crossed herself, men took off their hats—­farther up the hill a French sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.

The three caskets were draped in flags—­not the tricolor, but the Union Jack.  No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps, that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had given their lives to France.