Toul!  Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw its towers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven.  We wound in misty roads and dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walled bastions.  There lay France—­a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France.  The city was dispossessed.  Through its streets—­its narrow, winding streets, old and low and dark, carven and quaint,—­poured thousands upon thousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threw back awkward syllables that were never French.  Here was France beaten to her knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in her death agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strut and careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world from the wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools.

* * * * *

Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump.  Tim Brimm and the bugles of Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine.  The tiny streets were seas of mud.  Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air above the blue Moselle.  Soldiers—­soldiers everywhere—­black soldiers, boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi.  Wild and sweet and wooing leapt the strains upon the air.  French children gazed in wonder—­women left their washing.  Up in the window stood a black Major, a Captain, a Teacher, and I—­with tears behind our smiling eyes.  Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump.

The audience was framed in smoke.  It rose ghost-like out of memories—­bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whose pain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be “Jim-Crowed” with privates or not.  Memories of that great last morning when the thunders of hell called the Ninety-second to its last drive.  Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories, and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven.  Like memories framed in the breath of God, my audience peered in upon me—­good, brown faces with great, kind, beautiful eyes—­black soldiers of America rescuing beloved France—­and the words came in praise and benediction there in the “Y,” with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rusty wood stove.

“Alors,” said Madame, “quatre sont morts”—­four dead—­four tall, strong sons dead for France—­sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughter who was hiding her brave smile in the dusk.  It was a tiny stone house whose front window lipped the passing sidewalk where ever tramped the feet of black soldiers marching home.  There was a cavernous wardrobe, a great fireplace invaded by a new and jaunty iron stove.  Vast, thick piles of bedding rose in yonder corner.  Without was the crowded kitchen and up a half-stair was our bedroom that gave upon a tiny court with arched stone staircase and one green tree.  We were a touching family party held together by a great sorrow and a great joy.  How we laughed over the salad that got brandy instead of vinegar—­how we ate the golden pile of fried potatoes and how we pored over the post-card from the Lieutenant of the Senegalese—­dear little vale of crushed and risen France, in the day when Negroes went “over the top” at Pont-a-Mousson.