And then we turned from the pier and went our several ways back into the midst of life.  We were going home, and getting ready to go home is a joyous proceeding.  And there was another significance to our packing to leave Paris.  It meant something more than a homeward journey; it meant that for the first time since we left Wichita and Emporia in midsummer we were turning our backs on war.  It took a tug to make the turn.  From all over the earth the war draws men to it like an insatiable whirlpool.  And as we came nearer and nearer to war we had felt it swallow men into its vortex—­men, customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos—­into nothing, to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out there on the front.  We had seen it.  But seeing it had revealed nothing.  For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the hungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth, for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a race, for the creed of an era.  And we left them still ravening, mad and unsated.  And we were going away as dazed as we were when we came.  But as we packed our things in Paris, the thrall of it still gripped us and the consciousness that we were leaving the war was as strong in our hearts as the joy we felt at turning homeward.  But we got aboard the train and rode during the long lovely morning down the wide rich valley of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy with its steep hills which seem reflected in the sharp peaked roofs of its chateaux, and through musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hard to realize that modern industry was hiving.  The hum of industry seemed badly out of key in a town with a cathedral whose architectural roots are a thousand years old, and whose streets have not yet been veined with sewers, and whose walls are gay with the facades of the fifteenth century.  The whole face of the landscape, town and country side, seemed to us like the back drop of the first act in a comic opera, and we were forever listening for “The Chimes of Normandy!” Instead we heard the noon whistle.  It was tremendously incongruous.  How American humour cracks into sardonic ribaldry at the spectacle.  The French are the least bit unhappy about this American humour.  They don’t entirely see it.  Once outside of a poor French village near the war zone, that had been bombed from the German lines, bombed from the German airships and ravaged by fire and sword, some American soldiers, looking at the desolation and the ruin of the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, so hopeless in its pitiful finality, painted on a large white board, and nailed on a sign post just at the edge of the town this slogan: 

“Watch Commercy Grow!  Boost for the Old Town!”

But in that flash of humour the tragedy of Commercy stood revealed clearer than in a flood of tears!