“What, denying your birthright!  I never heard an American do that before!  Everybody knows you’re a Yankee.”

“Pardon me.  General, you and all other Europeans make a mistake about the Yankees.  At home the people of the Southern States generally apply it to those living in the Northern states, but in the North it is carried still further and is properly applied to the residents of the six New England states.  I don’t come from one of those states, and so I’m not in a real sense a Yankee.”

“What, sir, have I, a Frenchman, to do with your local distinctions?  Yankees you all are and Yankee you shall remain.  It’s a fine name, and from what I’ve seen in this war you’re great fighting men, worthy to stand with Frenchmen.”

“Thank you for the compliment, General,” said John, smiling.  “Hereafter I shall always remain a Yankee.”

“And now do you and your friends take your food there with de Rougemont.  I’ve had my breakfast, and a big and good one it was.  I’m going to the edge of the hill and use my glasses.”

He waddled away, looking more than ever an enormous, good-natured bear.  John’s heart, as always, warmed to him.  Truly he was the father of his children, ten thousand or more, who fought around him, and for whose welfare he had a most vigilant eye and mind.

The three joined a group of the Strangers, Captain Colton at their head, and they stood there together, eating and drinking, their appetites made wonderfully keen by the sharp morning and a hard life in the open air.  Bougainville, the little colonel, came from the next valley and remained with them awhile.  He was almost the color of an Indian now, but his uniform was remarkably trim and clean and he bore himself with dignity.  He was distinctly a personality and John knew that no one would care to undertake liberties with him.

In the long months following the battle on the Marne Bougainville had done great deeds.  Again and again he had thrown his regiment into some weak spot in the line just at the right moment.  He seemed, like Napoleon and Stonewall Jackson, to have an extraordinary, intuitive power of divining the enemy’s intentions, and General Vaugirard, to whose command his regiment belonged, never hesitated to consult him and often took his advice.  “Ah, that child of Montmartre!” he would say.  “He will go far, if he does not meet a shell too soon.  He keeps a hand of steel on his regiment, there is no discipline sterner than his, and yet his men love him.”

Bougainville showed pleasure at seeing John again, and gave him his hand American fashion.

“We both still live,” he said briefly.

“And hope for complete victory.”

“We do,” said Bougainville, earnestly, “but it will take all the strength of the allied nations to achieve it.  Much has happened, Monsieur Scott, since we stood that day in the lantern of Basilique du Sacre-Coeur on the Butte Montmartre and saw the Prussian cavalry riding toward Paris.”