The sun was slanting through the plain.  Tall dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens.  As we whizzed through the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of colours.  And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias—­even the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the German bombardment—­villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan, from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.

As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war.  Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in.  Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead.  The visiting soldiers come “from over the hills and far away,” but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful, and they live daily with these women in their houses.  Moreover, the emotions of France are tense.  Death, doubt, fear and hope lash the home-staying hearts every day.  And amid those raw emotions comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human heart.  It comes honestly.  It comes inevitably.  And then, in a day or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village, in the street, in the home.  Five millions of men during the last three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men have lived.  And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous and gentle and as kind.

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded with soldiers—­kindly French soldiers who were clearly living happily with the people upon whom they were billeted.  Then Henry burst forth, “My good Heavens, man—­what if this were in Wichita or Emporia!  What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were there alone?  Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting about here were just little children three years ago when their daddies left.  What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but rest!  What would happen in Wichita and Emporia—­or back East in Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah?  What an awful thing—­what a hell in the earth, war is!”