Scantily but decorously clad, Colonel Swalm received us, and greeted us as courteously as though we had come to present him with a loving-cup.  He acted as though our pulling him out of bed at two in the morning was intended as a compliment.  For affixing the seal to our passports he refused any fee.  We protested that the consuls-general of other nations were demanding fees.  “I know,” he said, “but I have never thought it right to fine a man for being an American.”

Of our ambassadors and representatives in countries in Europe other than France and Belgium I have not written, because during this war I have not visited those countries.  But of them, also, all men speak well.  At the last election one of them was a candidate for the United States Senate.  He was not elected.  The reason is obvious.

Our people at home are so well pleased with their ambassadors in Europe that, while the war continues, they would keep them where they are.

Chapter IX “Under Fire”

One cold day on the Aisne, when the Germans had just withdrawn to the east bank and the Allies held the west, the French soldiers built huge bonfires and huddled around them.  When the “Jack Johnsons,” as they call the six-inch howitzer shells that strike with a burst of black smoke, began to fall, sooner than leave the warm fires the soldiers accepted the chance of being hit by the shells.  Their officers had to order them back.  I saw this and wrote of it.  A friend refused to credit it.  He said it was against his experience.  He did not believe that, for the sake of keeping warm, men would chance being killed.

But the incident was quite characteristic.  In times of war you constantly see men, and women, too, who, sooner than suffer discomfort or even inconvenience, risk death.  The psychology of the thing is, I think, that a man knows very little about being dead but has a very acute knowledge of what it is to be uncomfortable.  His brain is not able to grasp death but it is quite capable of informing him that his fingers are cold.  Often men receive credit for showing coolness and courage in times of danger when, in reality, they are not properly aware of the danger and through habit are acting automatically.  The girl in Chicago who went back into the Iroquois Theatre fire to rescue her rubber overshoes was not a heroine.  She merely lacked imagination.  Her mind was capable of appreciating how serious for her would be the loss of her overshoes but not being burned alive.  At the battle of Velestinos, in the Greek-Turkish War, John F. Bass, of The Chicago Daily News, and myself got into a trench at the foot of a hill on which later the Greeks placed a battery.  All day the Turks bombarded this battery with a cross-fire of shrapnel and rifle-bullets which did not touch our trench but cut off our return to Velestinos.  Sooner than pass through this crossfire, all day we crouched in the trench until about sunset, when it