"Speaking a few words of French" could only open a chink in the barrier of language between our men and the French people. Wherever two Americans met they could begin talking without waiting on an interpreter. The common bond of language promoted the family feeling of the A. E. F. In all their relations our men saw with fresh eyes, in the light of foreign surroundings, how like they were, not only in uniform and equipment and ways of thought, but how distinctly American even the European born and the sons of European parents had become. Old differences disappeared in this new sense of a fundamental similarity. Men from the different parts of the United States came together not only in the combat divisions but around the docks and railway yards and wherever they labored in the Services of Supply. Kansas, Oregon, and Maine had adjoining beds at a hospital, while a doctor from Pittsburgh or Oskaloosa, or a nurse from New York or Cheyenne, looked after them. Reserve officers who had been lawyers, merchants, engineers, gang foremen, bakers, bankers, manufacturers, lived and worked together in keeping the army fed with shells and food. "The gang's all here," was as expressive of the soldier's feeling in the Great War as "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" in the little war with Spain. To all in whom there was the germ from which it could develop, the stern fighting and effort brought a sense of personal power, quiet, observant, undemonstrative; and their sense of the presence there in France of two millions of Americans--scattered far and wide, omnipresent in their energy, welded into one mighty organization, pulsing with the heart of the home country three thousand miles away, as California looked Maine in the eye in that common family--brought a new sense of national power. It occurred to me that the A. E. F. symbolized how a great overgrown boy of a nation, with a puzzled feeling about its expanding physique, had suddenly become a dignified, poised, self-respecting adult. The men knew why they were in France, even if they did not express it in the phrases of oratory or propaganda. Their logic was as cold as their steel, as vivid as gun flashes. They were in France to beat the Germans. The period for argument had passed for them. They had the business in hand. Their bitterness toward the foe was not as great as that at home. Why waste words on him when you had bullets and shells to fire at him? He was taken for granted no less than burglary and murder: a positive material force to be overcome.