They were detraining in dense brown crowds at what had been the station before German guns had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the road from the west; and when I made my way along the main street to the river, I found another khaki-clad line leaving the little town, marching heavily, unrhythmically and strongly out across the narrow, temporary wooden bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone pillars which were all that remained of the old bridge.
An old, white-capped woman, who had been one of my neighbors in the days before the little town had known German guns or American soldiers, called out to me: “Oh, Madame! See them! Isn’t it wonderful! Just look at them! All day like that, all night like that. Are there any people left in America? And are all your people so big, so fine?”
“Where are they going?” I asked her, taking refuge for a moment in her doorway.
“To the front directly, the poor boys. They’ll be fighting in two hours—do you hear the big guns off there banging away? And they so good, like nice big boys! Their poor mothers!”
I addressed myself in English to a soldier loitering near, watching the troops pass, “So they are going to the front, these boys?” After a stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over his face. He came closer. “No, ma’am,” he said, looking at me hard. “No, these are the Alabama boys just coming back from the front. They’ve been fighting steady for five days.” He added: “My, it seems good to talk to an American woman. I haven’t seen one for four months!”
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“Just from the Champagne front, with the Third Division. Two of our regiments out there were—” He began pouring out exact, detailed military information which I would not have dreamed of asking him. The simple-hearted open confidence of the American soldier was startling and alarming to one who had for long breathed the thick air of universal suspicion. I stopped his fluent statement of which was his regiment, where they had been, what their losses had been, where they were going. “No, no, I mean where are you from in the States?” I raised my voice to make myself heard above the sudden thunder of a convoy of munition-camions passing by and filling the narrow street from side to side.
“Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s just eight months and seven days since I last saw the old town.” (Thus does a mother count the very days of the little new life of her child.)
“And how do you like France?”
“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. The climate’s not so bad. And the towns would be well enough if they’d clean up their manure-piles better.”