And there were women—Red Cross women, Y. M. C. A. women, a few musicians and entertainers come to lighten the tedium of the boys in khaki. There were a few civilians, French people, returning from America for purposes important only to them. And there was a sprinkling of French officers, among them a boyish hero much followed by women’s eyes because he was a handsome boy made more handsome by the splendor of his uniform—trousers of red, long coat of black, and most of all, perhaps, by the cluster of medals upon his breast. He was only a youth, but he was France’s most famous aviator. There were third-class passengers. Forward were six hundred Poles in vivid red coats, recruited in the United States and Canada for the Polish Legion, going to fight for their country, which could only be a member of the family of nations if the Allies succeeded in crushing the enemy. Aft there were six hundred American boys—machine-gun men and a signal-corps unit. All of them—officers, men, women—knew that those hills concealed something, something tremendous. Resident in each individual was a consciousness that beyond there lay a new world, but how new and how different none was capable of realizing. The old life, the old ways, the accustomed rules of the game of life, had been left behind and few had the vision to perceive that they were left behind forever, that nothing could again be as it had been, and that they were standing poised for a step through a doorway which led into a new era. They were about to find contact with another civilization, with another philosophy, another method of life. It was not alone that they were to be set down in an alien land, amid a people speaking a tongue which was meaningless to them, and living their lives according to a manner which seemed good to them—and which _was_ good to them and to all who saw it with clear eyes and open mind—but because they were about to become a part of events through which no soul can pass without being so modified and molded as to emerge a different soul, detached, unrelated, cut off by experience and knowledge from the soul that had been. Behind those low-lying hills lay France.... What was France? It was, for every man and woman aboard that vessel, the great adventure of the soul. Just that. Each one of them was to be born again. With the touch of the soil of France beneath their feet would come a new birth, the entrance into a new life in which each would find much to wonder at, much to admire, much to puzzle over.... But they would find _themselves_. Moreover they would find a world which had resolved itself into genuineness, a world which was true, because war had stripped it of pretense.