ltitude of children, all in
wooden shoes, danced and clattered about, in honor of the ship's
arrival, and the windows were full of people waving the Stars and
Stripes, calling "Vive l'Amerique!" and trying, with occasional success,
to throw loose flowers and little round potatoes with French and
American flags stuck in them, onto the deck.

All of the houses looked very dingy and old, and the men in blouses who
pushed their clods about on this or that errand upon the troopship, were
old, too, and had sad, worn faces. Only the children were joyful.

As Tom went back along the deck, he glanced through a street which
seemed to run almost perpendicularly up the side of a thickly built-up
hill, and caught a passing glimpse of the open country beyond. France!
He wondered whether the "front" were in that direction and how long it
would take to get there, and what it looked like. It could not be so
very far. Presently he heard a more orderly clatter of wooden shoes and
he saw several of the soldiers, who had not yet gone ashore, hurry to
the rail.

He did not dare to do that himself, but as he walked he ventured to
verge a little toward the vessel's side, and saw below several men in
tattered, almost colorless uniforms, marching in line along the brick
street, each with a wheelbarrow.

He heard a woman call something from a window in French.

"There's discipline for you, all right," a soldier said.

"You said it," replied another; "it's second nature with 'em."

He gathered that the little procession of laborers were German
prisoners, and that the long ingrained habit of marching in step had
become so much a part of their natures that they did it now
instinctively.

Then he realized that he himself was a prisoner and was in a worse
plight than they.

He spent the morning wondering what they would do with him and his
brother. Of course they believed him to be the accomplice of his
brother. They probably thought he had weakened and told in terror and in
hope of clemency. He wondered if they had gone through his brother's
luggage yet and whether they had found any papers.

He realized that it seemed almost too much of a coincidence that he and
his brother should have happened on the same ship--and in the same
stateroom, all by accident. And he knew that his coming down from the
deck just after the signal from the destroyer, looked bad. He knew that
back home in America Germans had gone to Ellis Island upon less
suspic