rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the morning, I
saw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a kiosk; it said something about
"Grande Victoire."

Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris,
bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For
three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads
drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but
he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the
war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were
spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its
essence, profoundly animal.




Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines



The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came
the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of
the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and
went to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man of
sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost
devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him,
standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellow
vest and white apron, I wondered just what effect the war had had on