I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American that I ever met was solely practical.  If you watch him closely you will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic end.  The American who accumulates a fortune to himself, whether it be through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines or establishing a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn’t do it for the money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating, manipulating, evolving—­the exhilaration and adventure of swaying power.  And so there came a day when I caught my American soldier dreaming and off his guard.

All day I had been motoring through high uplands.  It was a part of France with which I was totally unfamiliar.  A thin mist was drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners.  Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock.  The day had been strangely mystic.  Time seemed a mood.  I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient.  The way that led to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps, and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a fairy non-existent Hollow Land.  Landscapes grew blurred with the speed of our passage.  They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a second and vanished.  The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on his seat beside the driver.  He had wearied himself in the morning, taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre, now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters working on death’s manuscript.  After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging—­all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality.  We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills.  There might have been no war.  Perhaps there wasn’t.  Never was there a world more grey and quiet.  I grew sleepy.  My head nodded.  I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again nodded.  The roar of the engine was soothing.  The rush of wind lay heavy against my eye-lids.  It seemed odd that I should be here and not in the trenches.  When I was in the line I had often made up life’s deficiencies by imagining, imagining....  Perhaps I was really in the line now.  I wouldn’t wake up to find out.  That would come presently—­it always had.