Our Army at the Front

cret crossing had amounted to nothing at all. Everybody within sight and ear-shot was out to

around with "bannières étoilées" fore and aft. The sun was very bright and the water was very blue, and between them was that exhilarating air which always r

i-colored soldiers formed behind the deck-rails, and again the chieftain from ov

of space cleared in the quay in front of her by a detachment of grizzled French infan

r was at salute, and every civilian, too. In that tense instant a new world was beginning, and though it was as formless as all beginnings, the unerringly dramatic and sensitive French paid the tribute of silence to its birth. The future was to say that in that instant the world allied on new bases, that men now fought together not because their lands lay neighboring, or

rers set in again on one beat. The officers who had come to make a fo

s strenuously forced by the infantrymen, to where carr

contingent as if every Frenchman in France

on. The streets were blanketed under uncountable flags. Every

que!" and laughing hilariously when their flowers were

ime. But they reckoned without their French. Not a town along the way missed its chance to greet the Americ

icial French greeting was too magnificent

ers in brilliant uniform, covered with medals for heroic service. There were massed bands, led by the Garde Republicaine. "Papa Joffre" was there, with his co-missi

ssador to France, and two or three other staff-officers, found open motor-cars waiting to driv

d Boulevards, through which the distinguished little procession was to

eat, is not easily forgotten. On this June day her raptures were immemorial

the fact that with August, 1914, the whole of life changed. To the old-timers who wanted to tell you what P

eets flowed with unending streams of grim but undaunted people. Tragic days and relief days followed. But the next great time, when tragedy did not outweigh every other feeling, wa

motors passed were tightly blocked except for the little road cleared by the soldiers. The streets giving off these were

Committee on Pu

hing in Pari

free behind them. The Parisians wanted not merely to see Pershing-they wanted to march with him. So t

el Crillon, and let it be known that he had other gear to tend, did the ci

collected, or children were underfoot, it was "Vive l'Amérique" an

s at the Crillon, his intention was that his retirement should be complete. He said flatly that a man who had just witnessed such

porters were knocking at the door. The American correspondents who had travelled over from London on the Invicta had had emphatic instructions to stay away, story or no story. But one

at banquets, or have them published in the newspapers," said General Pershing. "Besides, that is not my business, and, you know, we Americans, soldiers and civilians,

ppear out of proportion with the solemnity of the hour and the gravity of events now occurring. If I have thought it proper to indulge in this confidence, it

the cause the American nation has adopted as its own. We come conscious of the historic duty to be performed when our flag shows itself upon the ba

leon; the second, his appearance in the French Chamber of Deputies. If he had known what it was to be the hero of all Paris at on

waited his coming. On the morning of his visit to the tomb of Napoleon the broad Champs de Mars, in front of des Invalides, was impassable except by the soldiers' flying wedge

Joffre there had begun one of those intense friendships that form too impetuously for ordinary explanation. It was full-grown at the end of their first meeting, a matte

Niox down to the entrance of the crypt, and stood before the door. All the world may

came out again he was taken to see the Napoleonic relics, which lay in rows in their glass cases. Two of them, the great sword and the Grand Cross cordon of the Legion of Honor, had never been touche

ded back the cordon, kissed the sword-hilt and presented it,

ng one to President Poincaré at the Elysée Palace, which ended in a formal luncheon to Pershin

er business except that of doing him honor was promptly put by. Full-throated cheering began and

istory that the people of the United States should come here to struggle, not in the spirit of ambition or conquest, but for the noble ideals of justice an

his hand all the historic grandeur of America, which he now puts f

preciations and commentaries of the Pershing arrival. The most picturesque of these was Maurice de Waleffe's, in Le Journal: "'There are no longer any Pyrenees,' said Louis XIV, when he married a Spanish princess. '

on of our fellow citizens, with whom are mingled crowds of soldiers home on leave, have shown him clearly, right at the start, in what spirit we are waging the bloodiest of wars; with what invincible determination, never to falter in any fibre of our nerves or m

llowed with its eyes the whole of his passage along the boulevards; to all our hearts that salute

ndidly developed in his eloquent speech to the Cham

force. It was no rhetoric but the pure simplicity of the soldier who is here to act, and who fears to promise more than he can perform

ng gaps in organization. Now the arrival of Pershing brings Hindenburg news that the Americans are setting to work in their turn-those Americans whose performance in the War of Secession showed them capable of such 'improvisation of war' as th

t military action, cannot fail to prove to him that, after all, the moral forces he ignored must always be taken into account in forecasting human probabilities. Those learned Boches have yet to understand that in the course of his intellectual evolution, m

sk General Pershing had left off celebrating and

be done for and with them once they landed, for the plans did not even exist. It was the business of the general and his staff to creat

ed street near the H?tel des Invalides, overlooking the Champs de Mars. The house had bel

d answered questions. Under the once sumptuous stairway there were stacks of army cots. The walls were bulletined and covered with directions carefully done in two languages. The chief of the Intelligence Secti

plotted out, and General Pershing made good his prediction that

pondents that they must take a certain train at a certain hour, under the guidance of Major Frederick Palmer, pres