His first reaction to the people was rather romantic. He saw romance in every one. Hotel porters with one arm, wearing the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur, and perhaps the Médaille Militaire excited him. Each one was, in truth, a hero. These men had seen and done. Now they worked at menial tasks, still wearing uniforms, and with those medals on the breast which raised them into the aristocracy of manhood. It was strange to him that a man could be at once an honored hero and a porter.... _Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité_ were inscribed on every public building. This was one of the manifestations of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. These things really existed, and so a porter could be a decorated hero. If one addressed a taxi-driver one called him _Monsieur_, just as if one were addressing the President of the Republic itself. One addressed the _gendarmes_ as _Monsieur_. One addressed even the turbaned and besashed and betrousered Moroccan street-sweepers as _Monsieur_ if one addressed them at all. Monsieur Poincaré or Monsieur Clemenceau would have given them the same salutation. It was not an affectation; it was not what strangers have called French politeness. It was but a manifestation of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. At first it had seemed rather absurd to Kendall, American and republican though he was, but he grew to like it, and somewhat to understand it. Everywhere he saw heroes wearing medals. It made him feel insignificant and somehow lacking. One could not walk a block without passing officer or _poilu_ with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, or the rarer, even more precious, broad yellow stripe of the Military Medal. The narrow green stripe of the ribbon of the War Cross was everywhere. Sometimes the ribbons were elongated to give space to two or three, or, as was the case with one boyish officer, to eight palms.... And every palm the token that its bearer had fought back out of the clutch of Death, performing some act of valor which raised him above the level of an army of heroes....