[Illustration:  A fat man can’t wear the modern American Army uniform without looking like a sack of meal]

Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa.  And coming direct from Paris, where men out of uniform were few, the thing that opened our mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw.  There were worlds and worlds of men in Genoa; men in civilian clothes.  The streets were black with men.  Straw hats, two piece suits, gay neck-ties—­things which were as remote from France as from Mars, figures that recalled the ancient days of one’s youth, before the war; days in New York, for instance, where men in straw hats and white crash were common.  These things we saw with amazement in Genoa!  And then our eyes caught the flashy bands on their arms—­bands that indicated that these men are in the industrial reserves, not drafted because they are doing industrial war work.  But for all of these industrial reservists there was an overplus of men in Genoa.  It is a seaport and there were “the market girls and fishermen, the shepherds and the sailors, too,” a crowd gathered from the world’s ends, and we sat under the deep arches before a gay cafe, listened to New York musical hits from the summer’s roof gardens, and watched the show.  In that day—­only three weeks before the German invasion—­the war was a long way from Genoa.  At the next table to us an American sea-faring man was telling an English naval officer about the adventures of three sailing ships which had bested two submarines three days before in the Mediterranean; some Moroccan sailors were flirting across two tables with some pretty Piedmontese girls, and inside the cafe, the harp, the flute and the violin were doing what they could to make all our hearts beat young!  A picture show across the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and a vaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from the spray.  Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmic swish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music.  Here and there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning; but uniforms and mourners were uncommon.  The war was a tale that is told.

But the next day in Rome the war moved into our vision again.  But even if Rome was more visibly martial than Genoa, still it was not Paris.  One could see gay colours upon women in Rome; one might see straw hats upon the men, and in the stores and shops the war did not fill every window as it filled the shop windows of Paris.  Rome was taking the war seriously, of course, but the war was not the tragedy to Rome before the invasion that it was to France.