three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those
fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are
quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men
have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring
women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous
and gentle and as kind.

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded
with soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly living
happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry
burst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichita
or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine
soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were
there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting
about here were just little children three years ago when their
daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by
the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but
rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East in
Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful
thing--what a hell in the earth, war is!"

And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they
were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and
waste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sitting
together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming
in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line.
And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat--that precious
load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne
where we were the oldest people in the ship's company. And we began
talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth.