he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war
to be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which,
when it offered itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal.
Long before the war was anything more than a vague possibility,
he had imagined the time

. . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides
Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them
Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides.

So far back indeed as May, 1912, he had written to his mother from Paris:
"Is it not fine the way the Balkan States are triumphing?
I have been so excited over the war, it would have needed
a very small opportunity to have taken me over there." It is evident, then,
that the soldier's life had long been included among the possibilities
which fascinated him. But apart from this general proclivity to adventure,
this desire to "live dangerously", he was impelled by a simple sentiment
of loyalty to the country and city of his heart, which he himself explained
in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to 'The New Republic'
(New York, May 22, 1915):

==

I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case
is little known, even by the French, yet altogether interesting and appealing.
They are foreigners on whom the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion.
But they had stood on the butte in springtime perhaps,
as Julian and Louise stood, and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights
of the beautiful city. Paris--mystic, maternal, personified,
to whom they owed the happiest moments of their lives--Paris was in peril.
Were they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than [that by which]
their comrades were bound legally, to put their breasts between her
and destruction? Without renouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen
to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world.
Did not the benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty
that heart and conscience could not deny?

"Why did you enlist?" In every case the answer was the same.
That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the old haunts were desolate,
the boon companions had gone. It was unthinkable to leave the danger to them
and accept only the pleasures oneself, to go on enjoying
the sweet things of life in defence of which they were perhaps even then
shedding their blood in the no