hard day's
work on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the
passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles. And
the note they strike is presently sustained by a glimpse, on a siding, of
an efficient-looking Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tiny French
locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an acquaintance with the
young colonel in command of the town. Though an officer of the regular
army, he brings home to one the fact that the days of the military
martinet have gone for ever. He is military, indeed-erect and soldierly
--but fortune has amazingly made him a mayor and an autocrat, a builder,
and in some sense a railway-manager and superintendent of docks. And to
these functions have been added those of police commissioner, of
administrator of social welfare and hygiene. It will be a comfort to
those at home to learn that their sons in our army in France are cared
for as no enlisted men have ever been cared for before.

IV

By the end of September I had reached England, eager to gain a fresh
impression of conditions there.

The weather in London was mild and clear. The third evening after I had
got settled in one of those delightfully English hotels in the heart of
the city, yet removed from the traffic, with letter-boxes that still bear
the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American naval officers in
their sitting-room on the ground floor. The cloth had not been removed
from the dinner-table, around which we were chatting, when a certain
strange sound reached our ears--a sound not to be identified with the
distant roar of the motor-busses in Pall Mall, nor with the sharp bark of
the taxi-horns, although not unlike them. We sat listening intently, and
heard the sound again.

"The Germans have come," one of the officers remarked, as he finished his
coffee. The other looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock. "They must
have left their lines about seven," he said.

In spite of the fact that our newspapers at home had made me familiar
with these aeroplane raids, as I sat there, amidst those comfortable
surroundings, the thing seemed absolutely incredible. To fly one hundred
and fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, bomb London,
and fly back again by midnight! We were going to be bombed! The
anti-aircraft guns were already searching the sky for the invaders. It is
sinister, and yet you are seized by an overwhelming curiosity