It is all so orderly, so organized, so American, this thing we are doing in France. It is like the effective manipulation of a great trust. The leadership of the American forces in France in the army and in the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. is made up of men known all over the United States; the names of those leaders who are soldiers may not be mentioned. They have dropped out of American civilian life so quietly that they are scarcely missed. Yet for weeks we lived in the hotel with one of the prominent figures in American finance who is working eighteen hours a day buying supplies, assembling war material--food, fuel, clothing--putting up scores of miles of barracks, building a railroad from tidewater to the American headquarters, equipping it with American engines, freight cars, and passenger coaches; sinking piles for the first time in a harbour which has been occupied for two thousand years, and unloading great ships there which were supposed to be too big for that port. He is the marvel of the French. Hundreds like him are over there lending a hand. They are about to handle in a year an army half as large as the other allies have been three years building. Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation, communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation--the whole routine of life for a million men and more must be provided in advance by these organizing men. This work, so far as these men consider it, is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing comforts at home, money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practically for nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor's wise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of passing fame. For their names may not be mentioned in the news of what the Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wherever one goes in Europe he is running across these first-class men. Their sincerity and patriotism may not be questioned. But they are getting something real out of it all. The renewal of youth in their faces through unstinted giving is beautiful to see. They are going into a new adventure--a high and splendid adventure, and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut, will never be the same lives that they were before.