rsonally-conducted party, after we
stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With
his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and his
freedom of spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the
French call elan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private
you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know.
This definiteness, the result of military training as well as of Gallic
lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an
efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know
his part. This young man, you realized, had tasted the "salt of life," as
Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had
known the intoxication of a charge.

"Does everything go well?" M. Doumer asked. "It is not going at all,
now. It is sticking," was the answer. "Some Germans were busy up
there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They
have a covered trench and rapid-fire-gun positions to sweep a zone
of fire which they have cleared."

Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dug-outs
as shelter from shells!

There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private
saying: "Now this is what the general ought to do!" It was Napoleon's
own plan revealed. "You keep still!" he said. "This army has too many
generals."

"They mean to make a stand," the private went on. "It's an ideal place
for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We'd be mowed down by
machine-guns." The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine-
gun gave point to his conclusion. "Our infantry is hugging what we
have and intrenching. You'd better not go up. One has to know the
way, or he'll walk right into a sharpshooter's bullet"--instructions that
would have been applicable a year later when one was about to visit
a British trench in almost the same location.

The siege-warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was singular
to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and then to return
to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain of secrecy,
where the public thought that the Allied advance would continue.

"Allons!" said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where
German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees
and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior
which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and
child