Our headquarters are at ——, not far away, and it was at Bar-le-Duc that I first saw our own men among the French for the same strange purpose. Something stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing, scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they have come across the seas to do—quite simply kill or be killed. It’s all to come, for “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” and it is for the young to fight. At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eighteen fried eggs; they are oozing with money, and _they_ aren’t feeling sentimental. One of the four young spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was changing a big plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other) said, with an appraising look at the counter, that he could “buy us out,” and a second added, “And more, too.” “How about those coming in later?” I suggest, and then I ask how long they’ve been here. “Been here? Just five hundred years,” a small one answers, promptly, “and the next time the ‘Call’ comes they won’t get me. They can take the house and the back fence, too, but they won’t get little Joe. This loving another country’s one on me!” “Don’t listen to him, lady; he’s homesick. We’re out to can the Kaiser, and he’ll take some canning yet, but I say next July he will be about as welcome as a skunk at a lawn-party.” And then even the homesick one cheered up. The simile made me think of summer evenings in New England, but I only asked when they were to go back to ——. “We ought to have been there at 10.15.” I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The hands pointed to 3.30. They were then five and a quarter hours late. “You don’t know ‘_Gun_court.’ It’s a fierce place,” said one, in answer to the look. “Aren’t you busy?” “Holy smoke! She says _are we busy_! Why, we dig ourselves in all day, and we dig ourselves out all night, and somebody after you all the time. I don’t call this war. We’re out for real trouble.” “Well, you’ll get it when you see your officer,” I remarked, unfeelingly. Just then a _poilu_ whom they seemed to know approached with his ten centimes. One of the Sammies knocks it out of his hand onto the counter, points to his own chest, says, “On me, a square meal,” and opens his bursting purse for me to take whatever is necessary. The _poilu_, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of paper, says to me, with eyes the size of saucers, “_Sont-ils tous millionaires?_” ... Apart from his “private resources,” which seem unlimited, the American receives just twenty times a day what the Frenchman does. But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so untried, so generous—and a sea of blood awaiting them! Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin-faced, dark-eyed man with glasses shiveringly drinks his hot chocolate. “It’s too long, the war,” he says, “two years—even three—_mais cela traîne trop, nos bonnes qualités s’usent et se perdent_.” “What were you before the war?”