ed
each hilltop would bring them into view, and as the detonation puffed
across the landscape, one even fancied one could feel the concussion in
one's ear. Up from a field ahead of us an aeroplane rose and, in a wide
spiral, went climbing up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently
disappeared in the north. Then, after satisfying a sentry that our
papers were correct--such things could be done in those first days--we
got into Villers-Cotterets. Instead of deserted houses we found that
nearly every house was quartering soldiers. There were infantrymen,
dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians in white turbans and burnooses
on their desert horses, and everywhere officers. We had stumbled into a
headquarters!

With somewhat the sensation of walking a tight rope, we sought the mayor
to ask for permission to stay in town--finally to ask for safe-conducts
to Soissons. The charming old gentleman, undisturbed by war's alarms,
politely made them out.

Presently in a hotel full of officers we came on three civilians calmly
eating dinner. They had arrived by train, although there were no trains
for civilians; they were now dining at a long table set for officers
from which we had a moment before been turned away; and we were rescued
by a mysterious being at the head of the table--a dark, bald,
bright-eyed, smiling, sanguine gentleman, who might have been an
impresario or a press agent, and continually had the air of saying, as
from time to time he actually said: "Ssst! Leave it all to me!"

He was an American, he said, but spoke vernacular French. The other two
civilians were a London chartered accountant and a Canadian volunteer--a
young Oxford man--waiting for his regiment. Across the table, a big
French dragoon, just in from the firing-line, his horsetail helmet on
the chair beside him, was also dining. This man was as different from
the little infantrymen we had so often seen as the air of that town was
different from deserted Paris. Just as he was, he might have stepped--
or ridden, rather--from some cavalry charge by Meissonier or Detaille; a
splendid fellow--head to spurs, all soldier.

After weeks of newspaper rhetoric and windy civilian partisanship, it
was like water in the desert to listen to him--straight talk from a
professional fighting man, modest, level-headed, and, like most fighting
men, as contrasted with those who stay at home and write about fighting,
ready to give a brave enemy his due. The G