There are so many tales of unalloyed courage, and so many to tell them well, that I have purposely committed this chapter largely to a very faulty pen-picture of another side of the spiritual portrait of the American soldier. His bravery is very prompt and very honest, and no soldier of the world is braver. He confesses his fear, which is not pretended; tells how fast he ran, how paralyzed his tongue was, how he caught himself saying, "Engine, engine number nine, running on Chicago line," or wiping his forehead with his revolver! But all the time he has not turned away from the line of duty by a single hair. The type of his courage is unmistakable. It would be very poor form for an American to speak of this in any way that would make invidious comparisons, and to speak thus would insult the American soldier, who so thoroughly appreciates and so enthusiastically magnifies at his own expense the prowess of our allies who have done so much for us, who for four years have stood between us and destruction, and who even now must very largely teach us the modern art of national self-defence. "Private Peat" was of course over-enthusiastic in his praise, but he indicated a quality of bravery that I never failed to find in the American army in France when he said: "They are far ahead of the English and French in many ways. They are more active, more quick in thinking, and can decide in an instant what to do in battle. They have already made a wonderful record. Every allied soldier honors them." I saw the native genius of American fliers strikingly illustrated in an aviation contest between student fliers and their instructors. Every event--bomb-dropping, handling of machine guns, and trick flying--was won by the students. And the spirit of the trenches is not confined to those who stand in the mud of the trenches and experience their horrors. In Basingstoke, England, one night I sat with a queenly woman of seventy in front of a typical English grate fire. The war has taken much away from her; and, as she talked with such quiet determination and in tones so rich with suffering, she said, "_We_ who have been in the trenches for nearly four years ----" Ah, yes, the women too have been in the farthest places of the line. The long vigils of the soldier in nights that promise only terror and in days that bring only hardship are not kept alone. The mothers of men, their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts stand there too. And not only these, but the fathers and the brothers denied the privilege of bearing arms, but entering into the supreme ordeals of those who do bear them, by day and by night, in tense silence suffer in spirit the agonies which the bodies of their sons and brothers must experience at every station of the flaming trail that leads from the base to the far rim of No Man's Land.