of talking to them; but either his own shyness or theirs seemed to paralyze him. He found them, as a rule, bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all right, they said; but this hanging around Paris wasn't what they'd bargained for, and there was a good deal more doing back home at Podunk or Tombstone or Skohegan.

It was not only the soldiers who took this depreciatory view of France. Some of the officers whom Troy met at his friends' houses discouraged him more than the enlisted men with whom he tried to make friends in the cafés. They had more definite and more unfavourable opinions as to the country they had come to defend. They wanted to know, in God's name, where in the blasted place you could get fried hominy and a real porter-house steak for breakfast, and when the ball-game season began, and whether it rained every day all the year round; and Troy's timid efforts to point out some of the compensating advantages of Paris failed to excite any lasting interest.

But now he seemed to see a different race of men. The faces leaning from the windows of the train glowed with youthful resolution. The soldiers were out on their real business at last, and as Troy looked at them, so alike and so innumerable, he had the sense of a force, inexorable and exhaustless, poured forth from the reservoirs of the new world to replenish the wasted veins of the old.

"Hooray!" he shouted frantically, waving his cap at the passing train; but as it disappeared he hung his head and swore under his breath. There they went, his friends and fellows, as he had so often dreamed of seeing them, racing in their hundreds of thousands to the rescue of France; and he was still too young to be among them, and could only yearn after them with all his aching heart!

After a hard fortnight of day-and-night work he was ordered a few days off, and sulkily resigned himself to inaction. For the first twenty-four hours he slept the leaden sleep of weary youth, and for the next he moped on his bed in the Infirmary; but the third day he crawled out to take a look at Paris.

The long-distance bombardment was going on, and now and then, at irregular intervals, there was a more or less remote crash, followed by a long reverberation. But the life of the streets was not affected. People went about their business as usual, and it was obvious that the strained look on every face was not caused by the random fall of a few shells, but by the perpetual vision of that swaying and receding line on which all men's thoughts were fixed. It was sorrow, not fear, that Troy read in all those anxious eyes—sorrow over so much wasted effort, such high hopes thwarted, so many dear-bought miles of France once more under the German heel.

That night when he came home he found a letter from his mother. At the very end, in a crossed postscript, he read: "Who do you suppose sailed last week? Sophy Wicks. Soon there'll be nobody left! Old Mrs. Wicks died in January—did I tell you?—and Sophy has sent the children to Long Island with their governess, and rushed over to do Red Cross nursing. It seems she had taken a course at the Presbyterian without any one's knowing it. I've promised to keep an eye on the children. Let me know if you see her."

Sophy Wicks in France! There was hardly room in his troubled mind for the news. What Sophy Wicks did or did not do had shrunk to utter insignificance in the crash of falling worlds. He was rather sorry to have to class her with the other hysterical girls fighting for a pretext to get to France; but what did it all matter, anyhow? On the way home he had overheard an officer in the street telling a friend that the Germans were at Creil....

Then came the day when the advance was checked. The glorious counter-attack of General Mangin gave France new faith in her armies, and Paris irrepressibly burst at once into abounding life. It was as if she were ashamed of having doubted, as if she wanted, by a livelier renewal of activities, to proclaim her unshakable faith in her defenders. In the perpetual sunshine of the most golden of springs she basked and decked herself, and mirrored her recovered beauty in the Seine.

And still the cloudless weeks succeeded each other, days of blue warmth and nights of silver lustre; and still, behind the impenetrable wall of the front, the Beast dumbly lowered and waited. Then one morning, toward the end of May, Troy, waking late after an unusually hard day, read: "The new German offensive has begun. The Chemin des Dames has been retaken by the enemy. Our valiant troops are resisting heroically...."

Ah, now indeed they were on the road to Paris! In a flash of horror he saw it all. The bitter history of the war was re-enacting itself, and the battle of the Marne was to be fought again....

The misery of the succeeding days would have been intolerable if there had been time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for Troy's service; and, being by this time a practised hand, he had to be continually on the road.

On the second day he received orders to evacuate the wounded from an American base hospital near the Marne. It was actually the old battleground he was to traverse; only, before, he had traversed it in the wake of the German retreat, and now it was the allied troops who, slowly, methodically, and selling every inch dear, were falling back across the sacred soil. Troy faced eastward with a heavy heart....