took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory.  He took them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back.  They grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic.  In 1916 they all but grumbled themselves into revolution.  One heard revolt whispered in a thousand places.  But they did not revolt.  They will not revolt.  Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism.  In their hearts they are brave.

Over and over again as we went about France were we impressed with the courage and the tenacity of the French.  By very contrast with their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to loom large and definite and certain.  We met Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one of the best of the younger American novelists.  She told us a most illuminating story.  She has been two years in France working with the blind, and later superintending the commissary department of a training camp for men in the American Field Ambulance service.  She is a shrewd and wise observer, with a real sense of humour, and Heaven knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets the truth out of the veneer of tragedy that surfaces the situation. [Footnote:  This story appeared in Everybody’s Magazine in Dorothy Canfield’s own words.] It seems that she was riding into Paris from her training camp recently, and being tired went to sleep in her compartment, in which were two civilians, too old for military service.  She was awakened by a wrangle and then—­but let her tell it: 

“Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their heads in our window shaking a beret and asking for contributions to help them enjoy their week’s leave of absence in Paris.  My two elderly Frenchmen had given a little, under protest, saying (what was perfectly true) that it would go for drink and wouldn’t do the poilus any good.  And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the fat bourgeois who stayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn’t give a helping hand to the poor soldier on rest leave!  To get rid of them, I put a franc in the beret.  This was received with acclamations, and they inquired to whom should they drink a toast with the money.  I said, ‘Oh, give a good Vive l’Amerique.  That’ll suit me best!’ They both shouted, ‘Oh, is Madame an American?’ And to the dismay of the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another through the window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing on the running-board all this time with the train going forty miles an hour...a thing which was simply unheard-of in France before the war...one of the ‘privileges’ which the poilu take!).  Well, they shook hands with me two or three times over and assured me they had never seen an American before...and indeed the two bourgeois looked at me curiously.  Then one of them began to talk boisterously, expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with a liberty of phrase which wasn’t conventional at all, another poilu privilege!  They sat down, evidently for a long visit.  They were typical specimens: