en it came time to leave, for the
scene was too suggestive in its contrast to be pleasant: we, in
America, eating and drinking and laughing; they, over there in Europe,
fighting and suffering and hungering.

* * * * *

Leaving Rheims, we took a great gray car and drove south, ever south,
until, as darkness was falling, we reached the headquarters of General
Jilinsky, commanding the Russian forces fighting in Champagne. Here
the Russians have two infantry brigades, with a total of 16,000 men;
there is a third brigade at Salonika. The last time the Russians were
in France was in 1814, and then they were there for a different
purpose. Little could Napoleon have dreamed that they, who helped to
dethrone him, would come back, a century later, as France's allies.
Yet this war has produced stranger coincidences than that. The British
armies, disembarking at Rouen, tramp through that very square where
their ancestors burned the Maid of Orleans. And at Pont des Briques,
outside Boulogne, where Napoleon waited impatiently for weeks in the
hope of being able to invade England, is now situated the greatest of
the British base camps.

General Jilinsky reminded me of a fighting-cock. He is a little man,
much the height and build of the late General Funston, with hair
cropped close to the skull, after the Russian fashion; through a
buttonhole of his green service tunic was drawn the orange-and-black
ribbon of the Order of St. George. He can best be described as "a live
wire." His staff-officers impressed me as being as efficient and
razor-keen as their chief. The general asked me if I would like to
visit his trenches, and I assured him that it was the hope of being
permitted to do so which had brought me there. Whereupon a
staff-officer disappeared into the hall to return a moment later with
a gas-mask in a tin case and a steel helmet covered with tan linen.

"You had better take these with you," he said. "There is nearly always
something happening on our front, and there is no sense in taking
unnecessary risks."

I soon found that the precaution was not an idle one, for, as our car
drew up at the entrance to the _boyau_ which led by devious windings
into the first-line trenches, the group of officers and men assembled
in front of brigade headquarters were hastily donning their masks:
grotesque-looking contrivances of metal, cloth, and rubber, which in
shape resembled a pig's snout.

"Gas," said