when a shell comes in.  Also we had stood god-father to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and was for ever being “continued in our next.”  And it was all—­riding along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along trenches, and ducking from the shells—­all vastly diverting.  We had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of felicity, having four hundred pounds between us.  But it was almost finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came to Paris and tempted us to go to Italy.  It was a great temptation; “beyond the Alps lies Italy,” as a copy book sentence has lure in it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught us; and we started.

So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn day, and our heavy clothes—­two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly.  The two Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.  As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have to vote.  So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinois congressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us, in uniforms ourselves, after a fashion, but looking conspicuously civilian, and incorrigibly middle western.  Medill in his pea-green hunting outfit looked more soldierly than we.  For although we wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissioned officers—­commissioned as Red Cross Colonels—­and although we wore Parisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that they humped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at the shoulders.  A fat man can’t wear the modern American army uniform without looking like a sack of meal.  Henry fell to calling the tunics our Mother Hubbards.  We looked long and enviously at the slim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their god-like effects.  For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and a fat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway!  So we paced the platform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiers of France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked by us, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were.  For the American Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those latitudes as it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swinging through Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies, a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a million dollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of Northern Italy choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!  Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italian cities, from Venice to Naples.  Under that flag the American Red Cross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Cross uniform which made the soldiers’ eyes bug out there at the border in the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy.  But we three unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strange country.