desert. A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.

There came an official examination of our papers, done in a businesslike
way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to land in
France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great café opening
on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the difference
between the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the war. The ornate
restaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and decorated with
ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in golden mists and
sapphire skies, was full of movement and light, crowds passed by on the
sidewalks, there were sounds--laughter.

"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American journalist who
had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers. Outside of
that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not changed."

But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a terrible
absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables and
the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking, afraid
to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that could
not pass the physical examination of the army. Most of the other young
men who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan to smoke
cigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionably
Roumanians or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table, a father and
mother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him;--I
fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young squad
still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was enjoying a
night off with his family. Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, a
larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a "daughter of
joy," and an elderly English officer, severely proper and correct, was