CHAPTER II
"VIVE PAIR-SHANG!"
THE Invicta came into Boulogne harbor in the early morning, to find that her attempts at a secret crossing had amounted to nothing at all. Everybody within sight and ear-shot was out to show how pleased he was, riotously and openly, indifferent alike to the hopes of spy or censor.
The fishing-boats, the merchant coastwise fleet, the Channel ships and hordes of little privately owned sloops and yawls and motor-boats all plied chipperly around with "bannières étoilées" fore and aft. The sun was very bright and the water was very blue, and between them was that exhilarating air which always rises over the coasts of France, whenever and wherever you land on them, which not all the smoke and grime of the world's biggest war could deaden or destroy.
The Invicta's own flags were run up at the harbor mouth. Again the lines of khaki-colored soldiers formed behind the deck-rails, and again the chieftain from overseas stood at the prow of his ship and waited the coming of a historic moment.
When the Invicta was made fast and her gang-plank went over, there was a half-circle of space cleared in the quay in front of her by a detachment of grizzled French infantrymen, their horizon-blue uniforms filmed over with the yellow dust of a long march.
Behind the infantrymen the good citizens of Boulogne were yelling their throats dry. When General Pershing stopped for an instant's survey at the head of the gang-plank, with his staff-officers close behind him, the roar of welcome swelled to thunder and resounded out to sea. When he marched down and stepped to the quay, there was a sudden, arresting silence. Every soldier was at salute, and every civilian, too. In that tense instant a new world was beginning, and though it was as formless as all beginnings, the unerringly dramatic and sensitive French paid the tribute of silence to its birth. The future was to say that in that instant the world allied on new bases, that men now fought together not because their lands lay neighboring, or were jointly menaced by some central foe, but because they would follow their own ideal to wherever it was in danger. An American general had brought his fighters three thousand miles because a principle of world order and world right needed the added strength of his arms. And never before had American soldiers come in their uniforms to do battle on the continent of Europe.
The moment's silence ended as startlingly as it began. Bands and cheerers set in again on one beat. The officers who had come to make a formal welcome fell back and let the unprepared public uproar have way.
General Pershing and his officers walked through aisles strenuously forced by the infantrymen, to where carriages waited to carry them through the Boulogne streets.
It must have seemed to the little American contingent as if every Frenchman in France had come up to the coast for the celebration.
From the carriages the crowds stretched solid in every direction. The streets were blanketed under uncountable flags. Every window held its capacity of laughing and cheering Frenchwomen.