ac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. All
over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these
frosty afternoons.

Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection
and had to spend the night at Saintes. The tall, quizzical, rather grim
old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare--characteristic of that
rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know
little about--was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men,
and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he
lived in Cognac. "In Cognac!" the old woman repeated, looking from one
to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question:
"But you are not soldiers?"

We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. There was
scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful
of young fellows passed on the other side singing. They were boys of
the 1915 class who had been called out and in a few days would be
getting ready for war. In Paris you will see young fellows just like
them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in
rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at
home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing
as they marched:

"Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere--d."

"He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!"

They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as
now they were marching down the streets of Saintes--and they kept
flinging back through the frosty dark:

"Il est rouge--et noir--et blanc--Et fendu--au derriere--d..."

Chapter VI

"The Great Days"

They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the
Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid
in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told,
across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly
see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young
cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and
philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a
kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a
girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the
younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any
he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part