And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France. Essentially it is altruistic. Men are not living for themselves. They are living for something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyond the objects of their personal affection. Men are living and dying today not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends or families, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritual thing called France. We Americans who go to France are agreed that we have never in our lives seen anything like the French in this season of their anguish. They are treading the winepress as no other modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' blood into the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of course, as they do their hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers. Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He took them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. They grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916 they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revolt whispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They will not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In their hearts they are brave. Over and over again as we went about France were we impressed with the courage and the tenacity of the French. By very contrast with their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to loom large and definite and certain. We met Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one of the best of the younger American novelists. She told us a most illuminating story. She has been two years in France working with the blind, and later superintending the commissary department of a training camp for men in the American Field Ambulance service. She is a shrewd and wise observer, with a real sense of humour, and Heaven knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets the truth out of the veneer of tragedy that surfaces the situation. [Footnote: This story appeared in Everybody's Magazine in Dorothy Canfield's own words.] It seems that she was riding into Paris from her training camp recently, and being tired went to sleep in her compartment, in which were two civilians, too old for military service. She was awakened by a wrangle and then--but let her tell it: