one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, quite eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower classes, the kind which leaves its shirt open at the neck over a hairy chest and calls itself proudly ‘the proletariat.’  The other was a fresh-faced, vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds to the middle western American, a kind of Emporian!  He hadn’t much to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose.  They both, through all their roughness and coarseness and evident excitement over starting on their ‘permission,’ had that French instinctive social tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women from being afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and they were both very sincere, and desperately trying to express something of the strange confusion that is in everybody’s mind ever since the war...what are we all doing anyhow!”

[Illustration:  They were standing on the running board all this time with the train going forty miles an hour]

“Here are some of the things the fluent Paris ‘cockney’ said...for the type corresponds in Paris to the lower-class cockney of London.

“’See here, you know, we’ve had enough of it...We can’t stand it any more!  I’m just back from the Chemin des Dames...you know what that’s been for the last month’...then he gave me a terrible description of that battle...’how do you expect men to go back to that...do you know what happens to you when you live for twenty-thirty days like that?...you go mad!  Yes, that’s what happens to you...that’s what’s the trouble with me now...I know I sound wild.  I am wild...I can’t stand any more...it’s more than flesh and blood can endure to go back into that!  Why don’t the Americans get in it if they are going to?  Oh, yes, I know they can’t any sooner...but why didn’t they get in, before!  Oh, yes, I know why.  I know...but when you are mad you can’t stop to reason.  We look at it this way...When we’re not mad, from having been too many days under fire...we say, as we talk it over...There are the English...they’ve done splendidly...they’ve taken two years, it is true, to get their army really in shape...but they didn’t have anything to begin with...they’re fine...all that we could expect.  But all the same, during the two years, Frenchmen were dying like flies...just watering the whole North with blood...yes, I’ve seen a brook run red just like the silly poems that nobody believed.  And the Americans...yes...suppose this man and I should get to quarrelling.  Of course you can’t jump right in and decide which is to blame, if you don’t know much about the beginning.  You have to stand off and watch, and see which fights fair, and all the rest...But while you are deciding, all France is dying.  It is time the weight of the defence is taken off France...there won’t be any Frenchmen left alive in France...and here she