from Aix-les-Bains to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights the autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F. found it quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort. Four or five marines, back from a short leave in a little town near there, did the best they could for them and with their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for them in the aisle of a first-class car, and there the girls rode all night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them. The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she may trust the American soldier. Her experience with the doughboy has been large and so her tribute to the high qualities of his manhood is of very real value. Moreover, she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in the still more important leave area work which has followed--this last the great problem of keeping the idle soldier healthily amused. "I have known our girls," she will tell you, "to go into a miserable little French or German town filled with a thousand or twelve hundred American boys in khaki and in a day change the entire spirit of that community. There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the boys restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another, or in some cases, even bringing in the rough little village girls from the streets outside. But the next dance has seen a transformation. The girls of the A. E. F. have come, they are dancing with the men; there is cheer and decency in the very air, there are neither French nor German present--the place is American. "You have told of what the American girl has been to the men of our army; let me tell, in a word, what the army has been to the American woman who has worked with it: We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki and not once found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we placed our honor in their hands and never have trusted in vain." "The reason why?" we venture. "The mothers of America," is the quick reply. I know what she means. I have read letter after letter written by the doughboys to the mothers back here, and the mass of them still stay in my mind as a tribute that all but surpasses description. Some of them misspelled; many of them ungrammatical--where have our schools been these last few years?--a few of them humorous, a few pathetic, but all of them breathing a sentiment and a tenderness that makes me willing to call ours the sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of their army. "We're not doing much," one after another has said, "but say, you ought to see my mother on the job back home. She's the one that's turning the trick." * * * * *