ed their cups together,
while the shrewd-faced old lady in her flowing Red Cross cap beamed at
them.

The train then became crowded, and a French soldier came into our
compartment. I got to talking with him. He had been a prisoner in
Germany ever since August, 1914, and had been back in France just five
days. He was very young, with one of the saddest faces I ever saw. I
asked him how he had been treated. He said that he had never seen any
cruelty to prisoners, except that the last two years of the war they
had been so poorly nourished. Much else he told us about the French
attitude toward their allies. I have talked with many French and
American boys during this past week and have heard many stories, but
they must wait till I get home. Apparently the men in the ranks from
Australia, Canada and the United States, get on well with each other
and with the French, but they say many things against the English. I
think this is due to a sort of provincial antipathy on the part of our
boys to anything "different" from what they are used to. I have run
against this attitude in many since I have been here and it seems to
me a great pity. Whenever I hear boys talking against the English I am
going to try to make them see differently. I have found one exception.
Such a nice boy whom I talked with yesterday in the train. He had been
in the one U.S. division that fought at Ypres. As he described the
battle line his face was drawn with the horror of it, yet he had to
talk about it, and I let him, hoping he would "get it off his chest"
that way. "One thing is," he said, "that no one knows what the
British have been through in this war. Terrible as the Marne and the
Argonne were, Ypres was ten times worse. It was the most frightful
place on the front, and the British have done wonders in holding it."

He told me of many of the horrors, and talked about the wonderful
chaplain of his regiment who ministered to the dying boys wherever
they fell and who saw to it that the thousands of unburied dead were
buried and their identification tags secured. He said that you could
tell by looking at a Prussian officer that he would stick a knife
through a baby! Then we got to talking about his home in Ohio. When we
parted he gave my hand a grip like a vise and said: "You're the first
honest-to-goodness American girl I've talked to for fifteen months. I
sure won't forget you!" To digress still further, I just want to say
that it is a new and I beli