* * * *

Toul! Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw its
towers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven. We wound in misty roads
and dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walled
bastions. There lay France--a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France. The
city was dispossessed. Through its streets--its narrow, winding streets,
old and low and dark, carven and quaint,--poured thousands upon
thousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threw
back awkward syllables that were never French. Here was France beaten to
her knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in her
death agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strut
and careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world from
the wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools.

* * * * *

Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles of
Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny
streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air
above the blue Moselle. Soldiers--soldiers everywhere--black soldiers,
boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet
and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in
wonder--women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major,
a Captain, a Teacher, and I--with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim
Brimm was playing by the town-pump.

The audience was framed in smoke. It rose ghost-like out of
memories--bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whose
pain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be
"Jim-Crowed" with privates or not. Memories of that great last morning
when the thunders of hell called the Ninety-second to its last drive.
Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories,
and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven. Like memories framed
in the breath of God, my audience peered in upon me--good, brown faces
with great, kind, beautiful eyes--black soldiers of America rescuing
beloved France--and the words came in praise and benediction there in
the "Y," with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rusty
wood stove.

"_Alors_," said Madame, "_quatre sont morts_"--four dead--four tall,
strong sons dead for France--sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughter
who was hiding her brave smile in the dusk. It was a tiny