ot changed one iota
from the man that he was in New York or Chicago. He has transplanted
himself untheatrically to the scenes of battlefields and set himself
undisturbedly to the task of dying. There is an amazing normality
about him. You find him in towns, ancient with chateaux and wonderful
with age; he is absolutely himself, keenly efficient and irreverently
modern. Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border, from
the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you see the lean figure and
the slouch hat of the U.S.A. soldier. He is invariably well-conducted,
almost always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself. The
excessive gravity of the American in khaki has astonished the men of
the other armies who feel that, life being uncertain, it is well to
make as genial a use of it as possible while it lasts. The soldier
from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone,
listening--waiting for the call to come. He doesn't sink into the
landscape the way other troops have done. His impatience picks him
out--the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose. I have
seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the
crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself. Every man
and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is
happening inside him, "Let them take off my khaki and send me back
to America, or else hurry me into the trenches. I came here to get
started on this job; the waiting makes me tired."

"Let me get into the trenches," that was the cry of the American
soldier that I heard on every hand. Having witnessed his eagerness,
cleanness and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will
acquit himself.

I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American
that I ever met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you
will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic
end. The American who accumulates a fortune to himself, whether it be
through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines
or establishing a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the
money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating,
manipulating, evolving--the exhilaration and adventure of swaying
power. And so there came a day when I caught my American soldier
dreaming and off his guard.

All day I had been motoring through high uplands. It was a part of
France with which I was totally un