One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchored at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde.  A spindly lighthouse was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than to be burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with a dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floating mud.  From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of the strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one greenish-blue tint, and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coast suspended somehow between the strange sea and unlovely sky.  At noon, the Rochambeau began at a good speed her journey up the river, passing tile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone, and great flat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines.  There was a scurry to the rail; some one cried, “Voila des Boches,” and I saw working in a vineyard half a dozen men in gray-green German regimentals.  A poilu in a red cap was standing nonchalantly beside them.  As the Rochambeau, following the channel, drew incredibly close to the bank, the Germans leaned on their hoes and watched us pass, all save one, who continued to hoe industriously round the roots of the vines, ignoring us with a Roman’s disdain.  “Comme ils sont laids” (How ugly they are), said a voice.  There was no surprise in the tone, which expressed the expected confirmation of a past judgment.  It was the pastry cook’s voluble wife who had spoken.  The land through which we were passing, up to that time simply the pleasant countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instant to the France of the Great War.

Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend, and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of early twilight, were seen just ahead.  A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with the river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from the docks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental dignity, came a troop of Arabs.  There was a picture of a fat sous-officier leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze blowing from the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and dark, impassive faces.  “Algerian recruits,” said an officer of the boat.  It was a first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one’s mind to realize that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others were leaving behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the ancient desert.  A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.

There came an official examination of our papers, done in a businesslike way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to land in France.  That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great cafe opening on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the difference between the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the war.  The ornate restaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and decorated with ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in golden mists and sapphire skies, was full of movement and light, crowds passed by on the sidewalks, there were sounds—­laughter.