The only outwardly tragic touch came from our chauffeur.  When he heard the words “la mobilization” he flung down his cap, threw up his hands, bowed his head a second, then gripped his steering wheel and, for fifteen miles, drove desperately, accurately, as though his car were a winged bullet shooting straight into the face of the enemy.  That fifteen-mile run from Reuilly to Paris was through a long lane of sorrow:  for not to one section or class, but to all France had come the call to mobilize.  Every home had been summoned to the sacrifice of its sons.

We witnessed nowhere any wailings or wringing of hands or frantic, foolish pleading to stay at home.  Long ago the question of their dear ones going had been settled.  Through the years they had made ready their hearts for this offering and now they gave with a glad exaltation.  How bravely the French woman met the demand upon her, only those of us who moved in and out among the homes during those days of mobilization can testify.  The “General” was indeed to these mothers, wives and sweethearts left behind the saddest sound in all the world.

But if it were so sad as Sardou said in 1870, when 500,000 answered to its call, how infinitely sadder was it in 1914 when ten times that number responded to its wild alarum, a million never returning to the women that had loved them.  But such statistics are just the unemotional symbols of misery.  We can look at this colossal sum of human tragedy without being gripped one whit.  If we look into the soul of one woman these figures become invested with a new and terrible meaning.

Such an opportunity was strangely given me as we stood in a long queue outside the American embassy waiting for the passports that would make our personages sacrosanct when the German raiders took the city.  A perspiring line, we shuffled slowly forward, thanking God that we were not as the Europeans, but had had the good sense to be born Americans.  While in the next breath we tiraded against the self-same Government for not hurrying the American fleet to the rescue.

The alien-looking gentleman behind me mopped his brow and muttered something about wishing that he had not thirsted for other “joys than those of old St. Louis.”

“Pennsylvania has her good points, too,” I responded.

That random shot opened wide to me the gates of Romance and High Adventure.  It broke the long silence of the girl just ahead.

“It’s comforting just to hear the name of one’s own home state,” she said.  “I lived in a little village in the western part of Pennsylvania,” and, incidentally, she named the village where my father had once been minister of the church.  I explained as much to her and marveled at the coincidence.

“More marvel still,” she said, “for we come not only from the same state and the same village, but from the same house.  My father was minister in that same church.”

Nickleville is the prosaic name of that little hamlet in western Pennsylvania.  Any gentle reader with a cynic strain there may verify this chronicle and find fresh confirmation for the ancient adage that “Fact is stranger far than Fiction.”