The free-lance interrupted to call him out for a picture before it was too dark.  Gremberg took his position on the trench, his hand shading his eyes.  It is the famous iron trench at Melle from which the Germans had withdrawn.

He is not looking for the enemy.  If they were near, ten bullets would have brought him down in as many seconds.  He is looking into the West.

And to me he is a symbol of all the soldiers of Europe, and all the women of Europe who huddle to their breasts their white-faced, sobbing children.  They are all looking into the West, for there lies Hope.  There lies America.  And their prayer is that the young republic of the West shall not follow the blood-rusted paths of militarism, but somehow may blaze the way out of chaos into a new world-order.

PART IV Love Among The Ruins

Chapter XII

The Beating Op “The General,”

“The saddest sound in all the world,” says A Sardou, “is the beating of the General.”  On that fateful Saturday afternoon in August, after nearly fifty years of silence through the length and breadth of France, there sounded again the ominous throbbing of the drums calling for the general mobilization of the nation.  At its sound the French industrial army melted into a military one.  Ploughshares and pruning-hooks were beaten into machine-guns and Lebel rifles.  The civilian straightway became a soldier.

We were returning from Malmaison, the home where Napoleon spent with Josephine the happiest moments of his life.  Our Parisian guide and chauffeur were in chatting, cheerful mood though fully alive to all the rumors of war.  They were sons of France, from their infancy drilled in the idea that some day with their comrades they were to hear this very drum calling them to march from their homes; they had even been taught to cherish the coming of this day when they should redeem the tarnished glory of France by helping to plant the tricolor over the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

But that the dreaded, yet hoped-for day had really arrived, seemed preposterous and incredible—­incredible until we drove into the village of Reuilly where an eager crowd, gathering around a soldier with a drum, caused our chauffeur to draw sharply up beside the curb and we came to a stop twenty feet from the drummer.  He was a man gray enough to have been, if not a soldier, at least a drummer boy in 1870.  The pride that was his now in being the official herald of portentous news was overcast by an evident sorrow.

As if conscious of the fact that he was to pound not on the dead dry skin of his drum, but on living human hearts, he hesitated a moment before he let the sticks falls.  Then sharp and loud throbbed the drum through the still-hushed street.  Clear and resolute was the voice in which he read the order for mobilization.  The whole affair took little more than a minute.  Those who know how heavily the disgrace and disaster of 1870 lie upon the French heart will admit that it is fair to say that all their life this crowd had lived for this moment.  Now that it had come, they took it with tense white looks upon their faces.  But not a cheer, not a cry, not a shaking of the fist.