Captain Ware had hoped to be assigned to active duty with a combat unit. He had studied and trained himself for the duties of an intelligence officer at the front, and for months had looked forward with enthusiasm to those interesting and invaluable duties which such an officer performs. He was not a young man to welcome a desk job or to be contented with a position in the Safety of the Service of Supplies region. In that he resembled thousands of other young officers whose fortune it would never be to hear a cannon fired in battle, to take part in a charge, or to be nearer to the front than some small town in the interior of France. None of them had chosen their places. They had been sent where they were most needed and where their work was essential to the victories to be won against the enemy.... Captain Ware, like these others, must perform the task set for him, wherever it might lie—hoping always for a new assignment that should carry him to the dugout and to the trench. It was, therefore, with grievous disappointment that he learned he was to be stationed in Paris, apparently in permanence. He could still hope, for in the army in France no man can tell what to-morrow will bring him. Orders come and men go.... Somehow it did not seem possible to him that he would thus go to war without going to war; that he should journey across the ocean to this mightiest of all conflicts without the experience of battle.... At half after six he was again at the Union, where he found Bert Stanley waiting for him in the lounge, whiling away the time very pleasantly in conversation with charming Annette of the pert face, white teeth, and busy chatter—a chatter made up in very large part of excellent American idiom learned from the patrons of the cigar-and-candy case of which she was custodian. Hundreds of American officers will return to their country after the war with pleasant memories of wise little Annette, the little French girl who sold cigarettes and candy and wrist watches and post-cards at the stand in the Union. Kendall ascended to his room in the queer little elevator whose conductor was a tiny Belgian boy, proud of a few words of American, and presently walked down the five flights—for in France it is not considered good manners in war-time to use an elevator for descent—and rejoined Stanley. “Well,” said Stanley, “what luck?” “It looks like Paris for mine,” said Kendall, still depressed by his disappointment. “Might be worse.... Might have been Chaumont.” They walked north on the rue de Richelieu, past the Molière fountain, and by the door of Marty’s which Kendall was to know very well later on. At the rue St.-Marc they turned to the left until the Opéra Comique uprose before them, and then made their way into the up-stairs dining-room of the Café Poccardi on rue Favart.