commentary on this war that one does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as citizens engaged in a scientific undertaking of a magnitude unprecedented.  You come unexpectedly upon truck-loads of tanned youngsters, whose features, despite flannel shirts and campaign hats, summon up memories of Harvard Square and the Yale Yard, of campuses at Berkeley and Ithaca.  The youthful drivers of these camions are alert, intent, but a hard day’s work on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles.  And the note they strike is presently sustained by a glimpse, on a siding, of an efficient-looking Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tiny French locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an acquaintance with the young colonel in command of the town.  Though an officer of the regular army, he brings home to one the fact that the days of the military martinet have gone for ever.  He is military, indeed-erect and soldierly —­but fortune has amazingly made him a mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a railway-manager and superintendent of docks.  And to these functions have been added those of police commissioner, of administrator of social welfare and hygiene.  It will be a comfort to those at home to learn that their sons in our army in France are cared for as no enlisted men have ever been cared for before.

IV

By the end of September I had reached England, eager to gain a fresh impression of conditions there.

The weather in London was mild and clear.  The third evening after I had got settled in one of those delightfully English hotels in the heart of the city, yet removed from the traffic, with letter-boxes that still bear the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American naval officers in their sitting-room on the ground floor.  The cloth had not been removed from the dinner-table, around which we were chatting, when a certain strange sound reached our ears—­a sound not to be identified with the distant roar of the motor-busses in Pall Mall, nor with the sharp bark of the taxi-horns, although not unlike them.  We sat listening intently, and heard the sound again.

“The Germans have come,” one of the officers remarked, as he finished his coffee.  The other looked at his watch.  It was nine o’clock.  “They must have left their lines about seven,” he said.

In spite of the fact that our newspapers at home had made me familiar with these aeroplane raids, as I sat there, amidst those comfortable surroundings, the thing seemed absolutely incredible.  To fly one hundred and fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, bomb London, and fly back again by midnight!  We were going to be bombed!  The anti-aircraft guns were already searching the sky for the invaders.  It is sinister, and yet you are seized by an overwhelming curiosity that draws