Wooden ships!  When great passions and great aspirations stirred a country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the sheath of its valour.  Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden bottoms.  They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were the “going over,” the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!...

The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old turkey-hen calling her brood.  The soldier boys came running back along the embankment and leaped aboard the train.  The conductor shouted they would be in Hoboken in time for supper.

II

It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of the long dock waiting-rooms,—­which in other days had been thronged by people who came to welcome home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed to foreign shores.  Claude and some of his men had tried to look about them; but there was little to be seen.  The bow of a boat, painted in distracting patterns of black and white, rose at one end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible.  Down in the cobble-paved street below they watched for awhile the long line of drays and motor trucks that bumped all night into a vast cavern lit by electricity, where crates and barrels and merchandise of all kinds were piled, marked American Expeditionary Forces; cases of electrical machinery from some factory in Ohio, parts of automobiles, gun-carriages, bath-tubs, hospital supplies, bales of cotton, cases of canned food, grey metal tanks full of chemical fluids.  Claude went back to the waiting room, lay down and fell asleep with the glare of an arc-light shining full in his face.

He was called at four in the morning and told where to report to headquarters.  Captain Maxey, stationed at a desk on one of the landings, explained to his lieutenants that their company was to sail at eight o’clock on the Anchises.  It was an English boat, an old liner pulled off the Australian trade, that could carry only twenty-five hundred men.  The crew was English, but part of the stores,—­the meat and fresh fruit and vegetables,—­were furnished by the United States Government.  The Captain had been over the boat during the night, and didn’t like it very well.  He had expected to be scheduled for one of the fine big Hamburg-American liners, with dining-rooms finished in rosewood, and ventilation plants and cooling plants, and elevators running from top to bottom like a New York office building.  “However,” he said, “we’ll have to make the best of it.  They’re using everything that’s got a bottom now.”