“Oh, we have work to do over here,” one of these men said to me. “God help the kaiser when we get fairly into this war.” And then he exclaimed: “Are there really any pacifists left in America? If there are I wish they could see what we have seen to-day.” I wish so, too. I wish I could show the theorists, the “internationalists,” what I saw of those French refugees, the poor, despoiled working people and farmers who fled, as the hordes of old fled before Attila, another scourge of God, but one not less tigerish or void of soul. CHAPTER IX OUR FOREIGN LEGION “Do they really call you Sammies?” I asked one of the first soldiers I met in France. “They call us the foreign legion,” he laughed. “I don’t blame them, either. They expected American soldiers to be American, and we handed them an army made up of forty different nationalities. Come to think of it, that is America.” “I never realized it before,” joined in a young sergeant sitting near. “My family has lived in Massachusetts for nearly three hundred years, and I always thought of myself and others like me as the only real Americans. The Italians, Greeks, Russians, and even the Irish, seemed to me to be grafted stock. But I am in charge of a bunch of fellows, not one of whom was born in the U. S. A., and I would back them as straight Americans against any man in the ‘Descendants of John and Priscilla Alden’ society. “I’ve got two Czechs who ran away from their native land to avoid army service in Austria. That was five years before we got into the war, before there was a war. These boys hated army life and wouldn’t stay in a country that had compulsory military service. But along comes a chance to fight for the U. S. A. and these same fellows just pant for it.” The first soldier spoke again. “But what do you think of a Russian who ran away from Russia during the war, and yet wanted to join the American army? By the way, he wants to meet you. May I introduce him?” “Yes, indeed,” I replied, whereupon the youth stood up and called out: “Oh, Trotzky! Come on over, Trotzky!” And the Russian soldier thus libeled came rather diffidently from an adjoining room. We were sitting before an open fire in a Y. M. C. A. headquarters. “Trotzky,” whose other name was Jeff Bramfford, turned out to be a typical Russian in spite of his English name. His father, he said, was English, but he had lived many years in Russia, first as an engineer in an English-owned munitions factory in Petrograd, and later in Riga. Jeff’s mother was a Russian. The strange adventures of this young man began when he was twenty-one years old, a date which corresponds with the outbreak of the world war. Jeff was counted as a Russian citizen and was forced to join the army. He saw service in the tragic campaign which ended in the Masurian Lakes catastrophe. He escaped drowning in the swamps and also lived through the disastrous retreat across East Prussia.