swaying stays.  The orator’s passionate words and gestures evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful asylum of the west.  This smiling, happy folk, which I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, were now transformed, atavistic—­all save one, a student, who stared wistfully through his spectacles across the waters.  Later, when twilight deepened, when the moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave place to a singer.  He had been a bootblack in America.  Now he had become a bard.  His plaintive minor chant evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of that age-long history of oppression and wrong these were now determined to avenge.  Their conventional costumes were proof that we had harboured them—­almost, indeed, assimilated them.  And suddenly they had reverted.  They were going to slaughter the Turks.

On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the wide mouth of the Gironde, a name stirring vague memories of romance and terror.  The French passengers gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand and forest, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and hailed it as the promised land of self-realization.  A richly coloured watering-place slid into view, as in a moving-picture show.  There was, indeed, all the reality and unreality of the cinematograph about our arrival; presently the reel would end abruptly, and we should find ourselves pushing our way out of the emptying theatre into a rainy street.  The impression of unreality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the night when, after an afternoon at anchor, we glided up the river, our decks and ports ablaze across the land.  Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed against the blackness; occasionally a lamp revealed the milky blue facade of a house.  This was France!  War-torn France—­at last vividly brought home to us when a glare appeared on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomiting furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like beads over the crest of a hill, and, below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along monotonous streets.  A munitions town in the night.

One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs where the workmen, crouching over their tasks, straightened up at sight of us and cheered.  And one cried out hoarsely, “Vous venez nous sauver, vous Americains” —­“You come to save us”—­an exclamation I was to hear again in the days that followed.

III

All day long, as the ‘rapide’ hurried us through the smiling wine country and past the well-remembered chateaux of the Loire, we wondered how we should find Paris—­beautiful Paris, saved from violation as by a miracle!  Our first discovery, after we had pushed our way out of the dim station into the obscurity of the street, was that of the absence of taxicabs.  The horse-drawn buses ranged along the curb were reserved for the foresighted and privileged few.  Men and women were rushing desperately about in search of conveyances, and in the midst of this confusion, undismayed, debonnair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted figure standing under a lamp—­the unmistakable American soldier.