The very word holds within its seven letters the suggestion of great and little adventures. It really is the traveler's own word. Is it not, after all, the special property of the wanderer, who reckons the beauty of the world not by beaten paths alone but by nooks and bypaths? To the vocabularies of stay-at-homes or such routine folk as commuters, for instance, it must remain unknown--in its real significance. The troops which journeyed across France from the ports where our gray ships put them down--the laborers, the poets, the farmers, the business men who found themselves welded into a great undertaking and a supreme cause--will never forget the waysides of France. I mean the waysides that bore over their hospitable doors the emblem of the Red Cross and the emblem of the Stars and Stripes side by side. Sheltered in the hustle and bustle of railroad stations, in the quiet of château gardens beneath century-old trees and within Roman walls, they offered rare adventures in friendliness, in tenderness, in Americanism. CHAPTER VII THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR The _triage_ had been set up just outside of a small church which placed its buttressed side alongside the market place of the village. It was a busy place. And just because you may not know what _triage_ really is any better than I did when I first heard the term, let me hasten to explain that it is an emergency station set up by the Army Medical Corps just back of the actual firing line--that and something more; for the _triage_ generally means a great center of Red Cross activities as well. And this particular one, in the little village of Noviant, close behind the salient of Saint Mihiel--to which reference was made in the preceding chapter--was the initiation point of a Red Cross captain; his name is John A. Kimball and he comes from Boston. Captain Kimball told it to me one day in Paris, and I shall try to give much of it to you in his own words. He was just a plain, regular business fellow who, well outside of the immediate possibilities of army service, had closed his desk in Boston and had offered himself to the Red Cross. And to work for the Red Cross at the front was to face death as an actuality. "The wounded already were coming in, in good numbers, on that unforgetable morning of the twelfth of September, when they brought him in--the first dead man that I had faced in the war," said he. "We had had our experiences with handling iodine and antitoxin and dressings, but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.... His feet stuck out underneath the blanket that was thrown over the stretcher and hid his body, his head, his arms, and his hands. I saw that his boots were new and that they had been recently polished, too. Of course they were muddy, but I remember beneath the caking of the clay that they were of new leather. One does remember details at such a time.