And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and waste of war.  And this strange picture of love and death sitting together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line.  And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat—­that precious load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne where we were the oldest people in the ship’s company.  And we began talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth.  If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the storm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, how much—­how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?  How could youth come out of it all unscarred!  And she was such a sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise—­yet her heart was a girl’s heart, after all.  And the Young Doctor, his keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick in him.  As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out of him!  And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and they were so young and so untried!

The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our car were military roads.  And we could tell instantly when we were inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the road menders.  If they were German prisoners we were outside the thirty kilo strip.  For when the Germans discovered last spring that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep them thirty kilos from danger.  It was a rule that the Allies had been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they found that they might suffer by non-observance.  So when we left the German prisoners and came to French road menders—­generally French Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns.  These road menders always were at work.  Beside every road a few yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal.  A road roller always was in sight.  No road ever got bumpy and at given distances along the road were repair stations for the government automobiles.  Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war.  At night along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the line we travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurried through the night, passed village after village swarming with soldiers, black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritate the French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding into picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting