German parentage, and one man of Russian extraction. All of them had
been wounded at the front and all of them now had something nearer and
dearer to them than any traditions that might have been handed down to
them from a mother country--they had fought and bled and suffered for a
new country, _their_ new country.

Here in this ward was the new melting pot of America. Not the melting
pot of our great American cities where nationalistic quarters still
exist, but a greater fusion process from which these men had emerged
with unquestionable Americanism. They are the real and the new
Americans--born in the hell of battle.

One night as we lay there, we heard an automobile racing through a
street in this sleepy, warm little _faubourg_ of Paris. The motor was
sounding on its siren a call that was familiar to all of us. It was the
alarm of a night attack from the air. It meant that German planes had
crossed the front line and were on their way with death and destruction
for Paris.

A nurse entered the room and drew the curtains of the tall windows to
keep from our eyes the flash and the glitter of the shells that soon
began to burst in the sky above us as the aerial defences located on the
outer circle of the city began to erect a wall of bursting steel around
the French capital. We could hear the guns barking close by and
occasionally the louder boom that told us one of the German bombs had
landed. Particles of shrapnel began falling in the garden beneath the
windows of our ward and we could hear the rattle of the pieces on the
slate roof of a pavilion there. It is most unpleasant, it goes without
saying, to lie helpless on one's back and grapple with the realisation
that directly over your head--right straight above your eyes and
face--is an enemy airplane loaded with bombs. Many of us knew that those
bombs contained, some of them, more than two hundred pounds of melilite
and some of us had witnessed the terrific havoc they wrought when they
landed on a building. All of us knew, as the world knows, the particular
attraction that hospitals have for German bombs.

The aerial bombardment subsided after some ten or fifteen minutes and
soon we heard the motor racing back through the streets while a musician
in the car sounded on a bugle the "prologue" or the signal that the raid
was over. The invaders had been driven back. All of us in the ward tried
to sleep. But nerves tingled from this more or less uncomfortable
experienc