“Vous etes Americain, monsieur?”

I acknowledged it.

“Vous venez nous sauver”—­the same question I had heard on the lips of the workman in the night.  “I hope so, madame,” I replied, and would have added, “We come also to save ourselves.”  She looked at me with sad, questioning eyes, and I knew that for her—­and alas for many like her—­we were too late.  When she had mounted her wheel and ridden away I bought a ‘Matin’ and sat down on a doorstep to read about Kerensky and the Russian Revolution.  The thing seemed incredible here—­war seemed incredible, and yet its tentacles had reached out to this peaceful Old World spot and taken a heavy toll.  Once more I sought the ramparts, only to be reminded by those crumbling, machicolated ruins that I was in a war-ridden land.  Few generations had escaped the pestilence.

At no great distance lay the little city which had been handed over to us by the French Government for a naval base, one of the ports where our troops and supplies are landed.  Those who know provincial France will visualize its narrow streets and reticent shops, its grey-white and ecru houses all more or less of the same design, with long French windows guarded by ornamental balconies of cast iron—­a city that has never experienced such a thing as a real-estate boom.  Imagine, against such a background, the bewildering effect of the dynamic presence of a few regiments of our new army!  It is a curious commentary on this war that one does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as citizens engaged in a scientific undertaking of a magnitude unprecedented.  You come unexpectedly upon truck-loads of tanned youngsters, whose features, despite flannel shirts and campaign hats, summon up memories of Harvard Square and the Yale Yard, of campuses at Berkeley and Ithaca.  The youthful drivers of these camions are alert, intent, but a hard day’s work on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles.  And the note they strike is presently sustained by a glimpse, on a siding, of an efficient-looking Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tiny French locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an acquaintance with the young colonel in command of the town.  Though an officer of the regular army, he brings home to one the fact that the days of the military martinet have gone for ever.  He is military, indeed-erect and soldierly —­but fortune has amazingly made him a mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a railway-manager and superintendent of docks.  And to these functions have been added those of police commissioner, of administrator of social welfare and hygiene.  It will be a comfort to those at home to learn that their sons in our army in France are cared for as no enlisted men have ever been cared for before.

IV

By the end of September I had reached England, eager to gain a fresh impression of conditions there.