There were other grey beards in the room besides this willing veteran’s. Ranged at the upper end of it by the daïs on which M. Mirman sat with the committee, were the mayors of the various towns and cantons from which the boys came, about twenty in all, ready to answer questions on doubtful cases. Before the actual inspection began, the whole thing reminded me oddly of a Public School function at home, except that the headmaster wore the uniform of a Prefect of France, the boys were all of the same age and practically of the same height, and the assistant masters, many of them humble peasants, looked like hard-bitten farmers from the Yorkshire moors or the lowlands of Scotland. There was a great contrast between them and the boys. Mayors, as a rule, are men of peace, associated in the mind with gold chains and heavy dinners. But the mayors of Lorraine are different. They live very close to the frontier, and, as M. Mirman said in an earnest and spirited speech to the young recruits, they had lately had need not only of much patience and good humour, but of unusual physical and moral courage. All of them whose cantons lay between St. Nicholas-du-Port and the frontier had a few weeks before at least run the risk of being carried off as “hostages,” to say nothing of graver perils. Still, after all, the men by the daïs, bravely as they had stuck to their posts, had escaped with their lives. But the boys—I was looking at them, and thinking of the pity and wickedness of it all, when M. Mirman began to talk to them. The war that they were going away from their homes to fight in was, he told them, a war to kill war. When he put to them the question, “Do you want not to serve?” they thundered out the kind of “No” with which in England political audiences are in the habit of declaring to the world and to each other that they are not down-hearted. Sometimes these political negatives are not as confident as they seem, and are rather efforts at self-encouragement than statements of fact. But the “No” of the boys of St. Nicholas-du-Port was absolutely genuine. There was no question of that. Their only wish was to join the ranks and fight, and fight, and fight—till the wrongs of France were avenged and the victory won.