When I visited them, after leaving the Prefet’s, they had not yet heard that they were to be allowed to stay.  They had heard nothing of the city’s sentence or of the evacuation of the civil population.  All they knew was that the hospital, which had been appointed with their money, was only a few kilometres away and that they were forbidden even to see it.  They were gloomy with the fear that within a handful of days they would be again walking the boulevards of Paris.  When the news was broken to them of the part they were to play, the full significance of it did not dawn on them at once.  “But we don’t want anything easy,” they complained; “this isn’t the Front.”  “It will be soon,” the official told them.  When they heard that they cheered up; then their share in the drama was explained.  In all probability the city would soon be under constant shell-fire.  Refugees would be pouring back from the forward country.  The people of the city itself had to be helped to escape before the bombardment commenced.  They would have to stay there taking care of the children, packing them into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the wounded and decrepit out of danger and always returning to it again themselves.  As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed on them their faces brightened.  Risk and service, that was what they most desired; they were girls, but they hungered to play a soldier’s part.  They had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed from New York.  Those three months of waiting had stung their pride.  It was in Paris that the dream of risk had commenced.  They would make France want them.  Their chance had come.

When I came out into the streets again the word was spreading.  Carts were being loaded in front of houses.  Everything on wheels, from wagons to perambulators, was being piled up.  Everything on four legs, dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed and made to do its share in hauling.  We left the city, going back to the next point where the refugees would be cared for.  On either side of the road, as far as eye could stretch, trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, blockades and wire-entanglements constructed.  It all lay very quiet beneath the sunlight.  It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence.  One could not imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating torture and agony and death.  I looked back at the city, one of the most beautiful in France, growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its ramparts.  Impossible!  Then I remembered the carts being hurriedly loaded and the uplifted faces of those American girls.  Where had I seen their expression before?  Yes.  Strange that they should have caught it!  Their expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs, the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans—­the crack troops of France....  So they had become that already!  At the first hint of danger, their courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.