he
war. It would have come sooner; but if there had been twice as
many Socialists there would have been no war."

The free-lance interrupted to call him out for a picture before it was
too dark. Gremberg took his position on the trench, his hand
shading his eyes. It is the famous iron trench at Melle from which
the Germans had withdrawn.

He is not looking for the enemy. If they were near, ten bullets
would have brought him down in as many seconds. He is looking
into the West.

And to me he is a symbol of all the soldiers of Europe, and all the
women of Europe who huddle to their breasts their white-faced,
sobbing children. They are all looking into the West, for there lies
Hope. There lies America. And their prayer is that the young
republic of the West shall not follow the blood-rusted paths of
militarism, but somehow may blaze the way out of chaos into a
new world-order.

PART IV
Love Among The Ruins

Chapter XII

The Beating Op "The General,"

"The saddest sound in all the world," says A Sardou, "is the beating
of the General." On that fateful Saturday afternoon in August,
after nearly fifty years of silence through the length and breadth of
France, there sounded again the ominous throbbing of the drums
calling for the general mobilization of the nation. At its sound the
French industrial army melted into a military one. Ploughshares
and pruning-hooks were beaten into machine-guns and Lebel
rifles. The civilian straightway became a soldier.

We were returning from Malmaison, the home where Napoleon
spent with Josephine the happiest moments of his life. Our
Parisian guide and chauffeur were in chatting, cheerful mood
though fully alive to all the rumors of war. They were sons of
France, from their infancy drilled in the idea that some day with
their comrades they were to hear this very drum calling them to
march from their homes; they had even been taught to cherish the
coming of this day when they should redeem the tarnished glory of
France by helping to plant the tricolor over the lost provinces of
Alsace and Lorraine.

But that the dreaded, yet hoped-for day had really arrived, seemed
preposterous and incredible--incredible until we drove into the
village of Reuilly where an eager crowd, gathering around a soldier
with a drum, caused our chauffeur to draw sharply up beside the
curb and we came to a stop twenty feet from the drummer. He was
a man gray enough to have been, if not a so