It is not only the French language that our soldiers are learning, but French history as well. The part of central France occupied by our army is a storied treasure house of history. No part of France is more French. It abounds in castles, châteaux, museums, pointed towers, dungeon cells and torture chambers, ancient churches and crumbling city walls. Even the farms, centuries old, some of them, show the remains of past defenses. To our boys, fresh from the new prairies of Iowa and Dakota, or the still virgin forests of Oregon and Washington, this past they are surrounded by is the most romantic and wonderful thing that ever came into their lives. They can hardly believe it is real. Even to those soldiers who come from the older sections of the United States the sight is thrilling. In the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, in Paris, built by Henry of Navarre for his second wife, Marie de Medici, stands a stately marble fountain, moss-grown and mellow with time. The date cut in the marble is 1620. I had this pointed out to me by a soldier from Massachusetts. “Think of it,” he exclaimed, “the very year when our oldest aristocracy, the Pilgrim fathers, were cutting down trees for their first log huts and their rude stockades, these French people were making beautiful things like that fountain.” Long before that they were building beautiful things. Down in the southernmost part of our territory in France stand the ruins of a magnificent castle, the one where Edward the Black Prince took refuge when he was being pursued by that French king with whom he was contesting the crown of France in thirteen hundred and something. With two young naval officers I explored the place one warm spring day, and we were actually awed by the achievement of those builders of olden days. The castle was not only strong, it was noble and fine in all its masses. “It makes you proud of your Norman ancestors,” said one of the American officers, a Virginian. You can not go into one of the old Gothic churches or cathedrals on Sunday or week-days without meeting American soldiers, caps in hand, gazing silently at twelfth century Madonnas and saints, or tombs of medieval bishops. The miracle and charm of Gothic architecture is not all that draws our boys to the old churches. The sense of time and antiquity possesses them. It is something entirely new and wonderful to them to realize that the world went on, that people lived and loved and thought about themselves as modern and up-to-date centuries before Columbus discovered America.