“‘Oh, yes, we’ll hold them, fast enough!’ agreed the first one.  ‘We’ll never let them get past us!’ (This type of declaring poilu is much given to contradicting himself flatly!) ’But never, never, never an offensive again, from the French...you see, Madame—­Never again an offensive from the French!  They’ve done their share!  They’ve done more than their share.  Never an offensive.  We’ll hold till the Americans get here, but not more!’

“We were pulling into the station at Meaux by this time, and as the train stood there waiting, I heard a sound that brought my heart up into my mouth...the sound of a lot of young men’s voices singing an American College song!  Everybody sprang to the windows and there was a group of American boys, in their nice new uniforms, singing at the tops of their voices, and putting their heads together like a college glee-club.  Their clear young voices completely filled that great smoky station and rang out with the most indescribably confident inspiriting effect!  ‘Good God!’ cried the dingy, battered soldier at my elbow, ‘how little they know what they are going into!’ The soldier from Bourgogne said nothing, but looked very stern and sad.  The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, the other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and those splendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic episode imaginable.  There was America—­there was France.

“It changed the current of the talk.  After that we talked all together, the two bourgeois joining in...sober talk enough, of probabilities and hopes and fears.

“As I walked home at one o’clock in the morning through the silent black streets of Paris, turning over and over what that poor disinherited slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as earnestly and simply as he had poured out all his disgust and revolt, ’Good-bye, Ma’ame, I never met an American before.  I hope I’ll meet many more.  You tell the Americans the French will see it through...if a new offensive is necessary...we’ll do it!  It’s the only chance anybody has to have a world fit to live in!’”

When she had finished her story, Dorothy Canfield concluded something like this:  “That’s what they all come back to, after their fit of utter horror at their life is over.  It does them good, apparently, to talk it all out to a patient listener.  They always, always end by saying that even what they are living through is better than a world commanded by the Germans...what a perfectly amazing distrust that nation has accumulated against itself!”