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 unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting
across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into
fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like
tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our
approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as
an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the
sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic.
Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going;
that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led
to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps,
and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a