The Marne

y buttoned into his Red Cross uniform, he looked to his son o

, and Troy learned with dismay that he needed a secretary, and had

ous for you? It's much farther from the war nowadays than New York. I haven't had a dinner like this since your mot

r turn now. But Paris isn't a bit too frivolous for me. Which shall it be, fathe

the war fever late in life, and late in the war,

is cigar, and added, embarrassed: "Really, Troy, now there's so li

ficient to detach him from his job on a temporary mission; but long experience in d

leave that if I asked to be detached now-well, it wouldn't do me much good with my chief,"

o get used to the fact that he was himself under orders, and nervous visions of a sort of mitigated court-mart

althy signs of the nation's irrepressible vitality. But he understood that America's young zeal might well be chilled by the first contact with this careless exuberance, so close to the lines where young men like himself were dying day by day in order that the cu

roused from semi-inaction and hurried to Beauvais. The retreat from S

communiqués to appear in the windows of the newspaper offices, was in the thick of the retreat, swept back on its tragic tide, his heart wrung, but his imagination hus

ing a lift to a family of foot-sore refugees; of prying open a tin of condensed milk for the baby, or taking down the address of a sister in Paris, with the promise to bring her news of the fugitives; the heat and the burden and the individual effort of each minute c

le front. He had, of course, seen plenty of them in Paris during the months since his arrival; seen them vaguely roami

them, as a rule, bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all right, they said; but this hanging ar

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

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 o

breath. There they went, his friends and fellows, as he had so often dreamed of seeing them, racing in their hundreds of thousan

elf to inaction. For the first twenty-four hours he slept the leaden sleep of weary youth, and for th

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'

n 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

ce 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

t 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 unshakab

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, re

rror he saw it all. The bitter history of the war was re-enacti

time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for Troy's service

tleground 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