hauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches of
the front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had
snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the
first aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--most
of which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon or
the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how
to fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope,
and how to duck when a shell comes in. Also we had stood god-father
to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and
was for ever being "continued in our next." And it was all--riding
along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along
trenches, and ducking from the shells--all vastly diverting. We
had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of
felicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almost
finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal
and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came
to Paris and tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temptation;
"beyond the Alps lies Italy," as a copy book sentence has lure in
it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught
us; and we started.

So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in
Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn
day, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green
hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The two
Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting
outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from
Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.
As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about
the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have