beside the old roads of Flanders. And to me at least it seemed that the dominant note and characteristic quality of the _poilu_, and all his intense activity, was just a disciplined matter-of-factness, a calm, fine, business-like efficiency, an utter absence of all heroics. Of his heroism, it is superfluous to speak now. My observation convinced me, indeed, that fortitude is everywhere more common and evident, not less, than even rhapsodical writers have represented. There seems literally no limit to the powers of endurance of the human animal, once he is put to it. Many writers have written of the awful groanings of the wounded. I must say that, though I have seen thousands of wounded, the groans I have heard could almost be counted upon the fingers of my hand. Only once in my experience do I remember seeing any signs of excitement or disorder. That was in the roads around Poperinghe, in the first threatening hours of the second battle of Ypres. Once only did I get any impression of human terror. And that was only a reminiscence, left behind by women and children in the tumbled empty houses of Ypres. But in all the heroism, unlimited and omnipresent, there is observed, as I say, little or no heroics. That entire absence of drum and fife, which strikes and arrests all beholders at the front, is significant and symbolic. These men muster and move forward to the risk of death almost as other men take the subway and go downtown to business. There are no fanfares at all, no grand gestures, no flourishes about the soul and "la gloire." It is true, no doubt, that the ambulance-driver views the scene from a somewhat specialized angle. His principal association is with the sequelæ of war; his view is too much the hospital view. Yet, it must be insisted, he becomes quickly and strangely callous on these points; and on the whole would be less likely to overstress the mere horrors than someone who had not seen so much of them. On the other hand, as I have suggested, he has extraordinary opportunities for viewing war as a thing at once of many parts and of a marvellously organized unity. [Illustration: AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE IN YPRES] Personally I think that my sharpest impression of war as a whole came to me, not along the _postes de secours_ or under the guns at all, but at the station _place_ in the once obscure little town of Poperinghe, on the 23d of April, 1915.