I arrived two days after the first contingent of men, the dried mud of the trenches caking their uniforms and their worn boots, had marched to music and cheers through the flag-draped streets of Aix. I drove directly from the station to the headquarters of the provost marshal, and asked if a certain private soldier was in town, and if so where. He was there, and a sympathetic young man in uniform of the military police searched the lists for the record of his hotel. It is part of the intelligent care taken of our soldiers overseas that even on their permissions, or leaves from duty, the highest authorities know exactly where they live and how. No mother need worry lest her son get lost in France. He can’t get lost. In two minutes I had my son’s address and was on my way to the hotel. He was not there, but the black-eyed little _patronne_, also sympathetic, found me a room on his floor. It was near the luncheon hour and I sat down at the window nearest the street, eagerly scrutinizing every soldier who passed, especially those who turned in at the hotel gate. Finally a soldier came swinging down the street, and it seemed to me that he looked familiar. Yet I was not sure. Could nine months make such a difference in a boy of twenty? This one, with the absurd little tooth-brush mustache and the cap on the side of his head, was taller, broader, straighter than my son. He was more intensely alive. Yet he walked like my Julian. I waited for him to come up-stairs, but he did not come. I decided that he had gone directly to the dining-room, so I went down-stairs and into the big room, every table of which was filled with uniformed men, eating, laughing and talking. It was the boy. I was so overwhelmed at the sight of him that I could not take more than a step into the room. I could not speak. Something of my intense emotion must have reached him, for he looked up, saw me, and in one bound was beside me with his arms wide, just as when I used to visit him unexpectedly at school. “Mother, mother!” he cried. Instantly at the word the noisy talk and laughter stopped dead, and every man in the room sprang to his feet. It was not a tribute to me, but to their own mothers at home. Right there I adopted the American army. I am proud to say that a small section of the American army, all of it in that hotel, adopted me. Some were too shy to come up and be introduced, but I had broad smiles whenever I met any of them, and always, when I entered the dining-room, the same chivalric greeting. I talked with hundreds of soldiers during that week in Aix-les-Bains, and in the little town of Chambéry, two miles distant, also a vacation center for our men. It is not mere boasting to say that they are, man for man, the most amazingly fine-looking soldiers in the world. They average rather larger than the English, and broader and more muscular than either English or French.