The mere fact of lifting a wounded man "so that it wouldn't hurt"; of stiffening one's lips to a smile as the ambulance pulled up in the market-place of a terror-stricken village; or calling out "Nous les tenons!" to whimpering women and bewildered old people; of giving a lift to a family of foot-sore refugees; of prying open a tin of condensed milk for the baby, or taking down the address of a sister in Paris, with the promise to bring her news of the fugitives: the heat and the burden and the individual effort of each minute carried one along through the endless yet breathless hours—backward and forward, backward and forward, between Paris and the fluctuating front, till in Troy's weary brain the ambulance took on the semblance of a tireless gray shuttle humming in the hands of Fate . . .

It was on one of these trips that, for the first time, he saw a train-load of American soldiers on the way to the battle front. He had, of course, seen plenty of them in Paris during the months since his arrival; seen them vaguely roaming the streets, or sitting in front of cafés, or wooed by polyglot sirens in the obscure promiscuity of cinema-palaces.

At first he had seized every chance of talking to them; but either his own shyness or theirs seemed to paralyze him. He found them, as a rule, bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all right, they said; but this hanging around Paris wasn't what they'd bargained for, and there was a good deal more doing back home at Podunk or Tombstone or Deposit.

It was not only the soldiers who took this depreciatory view of France. Some of the officers whom Troy met at his friends' houses discouraged him more than the enlisted men with whom he tried to make friends in the cafés. They had more definite and more unfavourable opinions as to the country they had come to defend. They wanted to know, in God's name, where in the blasted place you could get fried hominy and a real porter-house steak for breakfast, and when the ball-game season began, and whether it rained every day all the year round; and Troy's timid efforts to point out some of the compensating advantages of Paris failed to excite any lasting interest.

But now he seemed to see a different race of men. The faces leaning from the windows of the train glowed with youthful resolution. The soldiers were out on their real business at last, and as Troy looked at them, so alike and so innumerable, he had the sense of a force inexorable and exhaustless, poured forth from the reservoirs of the new world to replenish the wasted veins of the old.