The stranger made no answer.  Probably he did not hear him.  Not a hundred feet from our windows three Greek steamers were huddled together, and the eyes of the American were fixed on them.  The one for which John had gone to buy him a new ticket lay nearest.  She was to sail in two hours.  Impatiently, in short quick steps, the stranger paced the length of the room, but when he turned and so could see the harbor, he walked slowly, devouring it with his eyes.  For some time, in silence, he repeated this manoeuvre; and then the complaints of the typewriter disturbed him.  He halted and observed my struggles.  Under his scornful eye, in my embarrassment I frequently hit the right letter.  “You a newspaper man, too?” he asked.  I boasted I was, but begged not to be judged by my typewriting.

“I got some great stories to write when I get back to God’s country,” he announced.  “I was a reporter for two years in Kansas City before the war, and now I’m going back to lecture and write.  I got enough material to keep me at work for five years.  All kinds of stuff—­specials, fiction stories, personal experiences, maybe a novel.”

I regarded him with envy.  For the correspondents in the greatest of all wars the pickings had been meagre.  “You are to be congratulated,” I said.  He brushed aside my congratulations.  “For what?” he demanded.  “I didn’t go after the stories; they came to me.  The things I saw I had to see.  Couldn’t get away from them.  I’ve been with the British, serving in the R.A.M.C.  Been hospital steward, stretcher bearer, ambulance driver.  I’ve been sixteen months at the front, and all the time on the firing-line.  I was in the retreat from Mons, with French on the Marne, at Ypres, all through the winter fighting along the Canal, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and, just lately, in Servia.  I’ve seen more of this war than any soldier.  Because, sometimes, they give the soldier a rest; they never give the medical corps a rest.  The only rest I got was when I was wounded.”

He seemed no worse for his wounds, so again I tendered congratulations.  This time he accepted them.  The recollection of the things he had seen, things incredible, terrible, unique in human experience, had stirred him.  He talked on, not boastfully, but in a tone, rather, of awe and disbelief, as though assuring himself that it was really he to whom such things had happened.

“I don’t believe there’s any kind of fighting I haven’t seen,” he declared; “hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets, grenades, gun butts.  I’ve seen ’em on their knees in the mud choking each other, beating each other with their bare fists.  I’ve seen every kind of airship, bomb, shell, poison gas, every kind of wound.  Seen whole villages turned into a brickyard in twenty minutes; in Servia seen bodies of women frozen to death, bodies of babies starved to death, seen men in Belgium swinging from trees; along the Yzer for three months I saw the bodies of men I’d known sticking out of the mud, or hung up on the barb wire, with the crows picking them.