If the American soldier has one characteristic which singles him out from the rest of the Allies, it is that Home is seldom absent from his thoughts—possibly because he is farther away from home than any one else. It is true that more water rolls between, say, France and Australia, than between France and America. But then to the Australian England itself is Home. In his own land he still refers to her as such. The true exile in this war is the American-born Doughboy. In most cases he has never been outside his own great and beautiful land before, for the simple reason that he has always found abundant elbow-room therein; and if the desire to roam has ever possessed him, he has been able to gratify it without stepping off the soil of his country or even beyond the border of his own State. Therein he is in different case from the inhabitants of those congested islets, Great Britain and Ireland, many of whose younger sons are thrust out in early life by the concomitant forces of natural increase and external pressure from the land of their birth to seek a living in distant portions of the globe—and in so doing have quite inadvertently created that unmethodical, loosely connected organization known as the British Empire, which is either a federation of free communities, providing decent government where otherwise there would be no government at all, or else a voracious octopus, according to the way you look at it. But the American soldier, being for the most part familiar with no country but his own, adapts himself less happily to foreign conditions than Britons who have been schooled by stern necessity to make themselves equally comfortable in Wei-Hai-Wei or Wigan. Add to this the natural outspoken American affection for, and belief in, American institutions and mode of life, and you will understand why American troops on the march through Europe will cheer themselves hoarse at the sight of such reminders of Home as an American policeman directing the traffic in a French town, or an imported American locomotive puffing along a French railroad.