nner of the last game. The players line up, each with a
handful of larger wooden balls about the size and weight of those that
are used in croquet. You try to roll or throw your balls near the little
one that serves as goal. Simple, you exclaim. Yes, but not so simple as
golf. For the hazard of the ground is changed with each game.

Interest in what people around you are doing is the most compelling
interest in the world. Train yourself to be oblivious to your neighbor's
actions and your neighbor's thoughts, on the ground that curiosity is the
sign of the vulgarian and indifference the sign of the gentleman, and you
succeed in making yourself colossally stupid. Here lies the weakest
point in Anglo-Saxon culture. The players quickly won me from the view.
Watch one man at play, and you can read his character. He is an open
book before you. Watch a number of men at play, and you are shown the
general masculine traits of human nature. Generosity, decision,
alertness, deftness, energy, self-control--meanness, hesitation,
slowness, awkwardness, laziness, impatience: you have these
characteristics and all the shades between them. The humblest may have
admirable and wholesome virtues lacking in the highest, but a balance of
them all weighs and marks one Monsieur le Maire or the stonebreaker on
the road.

The councils of Generals at Verdun did not take more seriously in their
day the problem of moving their men nearer the fortress than were these
players the problem of rolling their big balls near the little ball. Had
the older men been the only group, I should have got the idea that _jeu
aux boules_ is a game where the skill is all in cautious playing. But
there were young _chasseurs alpins_, home on leave from the front, who
were playing the game in an entirely different way. Instead of making
each throw as if the destinies of the world were at stake, the soldiers
played fast and vigorously, aiming rather to knock the opponent's ball
away from a coveted position near the goal than to reach the goal. The
older men's balls, to the number of a couple of dozen, clustered around
the goal at the end of a round. Careful marking, by cane-lengths,
shoe-lengths and handkerchief-lengths preceded agreement as to the
winner. At the end of a round of the _chasseurs alpins_, two or three
balls remained: the rest had gone wide of the mark, or had been knocked
many feet from the original landing-place by a successor's throw.