ink of glasses and chatter of confident
voices. Two men talking over their glasses.

"They tell me that Paris is some city."

"The most immoral place in the world, before the war. Why, there are
houses there where ..." his voice sank into a whisper. The other man
burst into loud guffaws.

"But the war's put an end to all that. They tell me that French people
are regenerated, positively regenerated."

"They say the lack of food's something awful, that you can't get a
square meal. They even eat horse."

"Did you hear what those fellows were saying about that new gas? Sounds
frightful, don't it? I don't care a thing about bullets, but that kind
o' gives me cold feet.... I don't give a damn about bullets, but that
gas ..."

"That's why so many shoot their friends when they're gassed...."

"Say, you two, how about a hand of poker?"

A champagne cork pops.

"Jiminy, don't spill it all over me."

"Where we goin', boys?"

"_Oh we're going to the Hamburg show
To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,
And we'll all stick together
In fair or foul weather,
For we're going to see the damn show through!_"

CHAPTER II

Before going to bed Martin had seen the lighthouses winking at the mouth
of the Gironde, and had filled his lungs with the new, indefinably
scented wind coming off the land. The sound of screaming whistles of
tug-boats awoke him. Feet were tramping on the deck above his head. The
shrill whine of a crane sounded in his ears and the throaty cry of men
lifting something in unison.

Through his port-hole in the yet colourless dawn he saw the reddish
water of a river with black-hulled sailing-boats on it and a few lanky
little steamers of a pattern he had never seen before. Again he breathed
deep of the new indefinable smell off the land.

Once on deck in the cold air, he saw through the faint light a row of
houses beyond the low wharf buildings, grey mellow houses of four
storeys with tiled roofs and intricate ironwork balconies, with
balconies in which the ironwork had been carefully twisted by artisans
long ago dead into gracefully modulated curves and spirals.

Some in uniform, some not, the ambulance men marched to the station,
through the grey streets of Bordeaux. Once a woman opened a window and
crying, "Vive l'Amerique," threw out a bunch of roses and daisies. As
they were rounding a corner, a man with a frockcoat on ran up and put
his own hat on the head of one