We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly, applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have been my fancy or the force of former associations, but already I was conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French--the day's provisions were arriving. Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now." "Anything you like; what's on?" "These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters? 'Debout les Athlètes'--'Sons of the Patrie'--they've been all over the place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud--haven't seen him--in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just time for the tram. Come along----" The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand Stand at one end of it, and already _les athlètes_ had got down to work. There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters, leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the outer track or resting in twos and threes on the grass. Several of them wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No Briton would have dared to display such physical naïveté. They might have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to the death.