Because I have myself marched with the armies of France, because in her hospitals I have seen the endless rows of white-bandaged wounded and upon her hillsides the other rows of white crosses, because I have witnessed the desecration of her churches and the destruction of her cities and the cruelties inflicted on her civil population by a brutal and ruthless soldiery, because from the bottom of my heart I admire her courage, her serenity, her abstinence from all complaint, because I appreciate the sentiment which prompted her to send us these great men as a pledge of her friendship and faith, and because I wish those of my country-people who have not had the opportunity of knowing the French as well as I have to understand what manner of men are these, our brothers in arms, I have written this little book. On the 25th of April, 1917,--it is a date which we shall teach our children,--the anchor of the Lorraine, which brought the commissioners from France, rumbled down off the Virginia shore. The route by which the mission traveled from the Capes of the Chesapeake to the Capital held in its one hundred and eighty-five miles more places of historical significance to the American people than any other route of like distance that could be laid out on a map of the world. At Hampton Roads, where the commissioners boarded the Mayflower, which was to take them up the Potomac to Washington, was fought the first battle between ironclads; a battle which sent the wooden navies of Europe to the scrap-heap and changed the history of the world. Across the bay the visitors could see the mouth of the James, up which sailed, two centuries ago, Captain John Smith and his fellow-adventurers, to found on its shores the first permanent English settlement in the New World. A half-hour’s steam brought them to the mouth of another river, the York, where once lay the frigates of the Comte de Grasse, the lilied flag of France drooping from their sterns. Here one of the commissioners, the young Marquis de Chambrun, might have said with pardonable pride, “A few miles up that river my grandfather, the Marquis de Lafayette, helped General Washington to win the battle which assured to the American Colonies their independence.”