“No,” we replied; “Americans.”

“I thought you might be English,” she replied in that language, which she spoke very clearly and fluently.  “Both of us have been many years in England.  We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is our home.  It is not a hospital.  But when the call for more accommodations for the wounded came in, we got ready our two best rooms.  The soldiers upstairs are our first visitors.”

The old porter came uneasily down the stair.  “Mademoiselle Pierre says that the doctor must come at once,” he murmured, “the little fellow (le petit) is not doing well.”

We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were cold and soaked to the skin.  Then we went out again to the ambulance and the rain.  A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning.  Later in the morning, I saw a copy of the “Matin” attached to a kiosk; it said something about “Grande Victoire.”

Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris, bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle.  For three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads drove continuously.  It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the war.  Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its essence, profoundly animal.

Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines

The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of the French soldier.  Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and went to a hotel I had known well before the war.  An old porter, a man of sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellow vest and white apron, I wondered just what effect the war had had on him.  Through the open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouette of the roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke of the vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard.

“You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago,” said I.

“No,” he answered; “I have been here only since November, 1914.”

“You are a Frenchman?  There was a Swiss here, then.”

“Yes, indeed, I am Francais, monsieur.  The Swiss is now a waiter in a cafe of the Place Stanislas.  It is something new to me to be a hotel porter.”

“Tiens.  What did you do?”

“I drove a coal team, monsieur.”

“How, then, did you happen to come here?”

“I used to deliver coal to the hotel.  One day I heard that the Swiss had gone to the cafe to take the place of a garcon whose class had just been called out.  I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, and being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter’s job.”