If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so
that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the
storm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, how
much--how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?
How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such a
sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise--yet
her heart was a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, his
keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick
in him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in
the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out
of him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this
awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and
they were so young and so untried!

The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our
car were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we were
inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the
road menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside the
thirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last spring
that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans
demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep
them thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had
been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they
found that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left the
German prisoners and came to French road menders--generally French
Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental
peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns.
These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a few
yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal.
A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got bumpy and at