the elderly
chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing overhead.
They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don't rally
to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to
gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too
fast. And yet, as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity for
their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a
blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been
"pinked." They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the
ambulance to help shove in a "blesse," and say good-by to him, and wave
to him as long as the road left him in their sight. The wounded man,
unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher,
to give back their greetings. It was an eager exchange between the whole
men and the injured one. They don't believe they can be broken till the
thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just what has befallen one
like themselves.

When it came my time to say good-by, my sailor friend, who had often
stopped by my car to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share
in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me a smile of
deep-understanding amusement. Tired so soon? That smile carried a live
consciousness of untapped power, of the record he and his comrades had
made. It showed a disregard of my personal feelings, of all adult human
weakness. That was the picture I carried away from the Nieuport
line--the smiling boy with his wounded arm, alert after his year of war,
and more than a little scornful of one who had grown weary in conditions
so prosperous for young men.

I rode away from him, past the Coxyde encampment of his comrades. There
they were as I had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering their
camp--candy men, banana women; a fringe of basket merchants about their
grim barracks; a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of cigarettes,
fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets. And over them bent the
boys, dozens of them in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays,
fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing, dickering, shoving
one another, the old loves of their childhood still tangled in their
being.

So when I am talking about the sailors as if they were heroes, suddenly
something gay comes romping in. I see them again, as I have so often
seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see is a race o