Under a moss-hung wall against which, according to tradition, Peter the Hermit stood with the cross in his hand calling the crusaders to march with him to deliver the sepulchre of the Saviour out of the impious hands of the heathen, a line of tired Yankee lads were sprawled upon the scanty grass doing nothing at all except resting. There were wooden signs lettered in English—“Regimental Headquarters,” and “Hospital,” and “Intelligence Offices”—fastened to stone door lintels which time had seamed and scored with deep lines like the wrinkles in an old dame's face. Khaki-clad figures were to be seen wherever you looked.

Up the twisting and hilly street toiled a company belonging to my particular regiment, and as they came into the billeting place and I new the march was over, the wearied and burdened boys started singing the Doughboys' Song, which with divers variations is always sung in any infantry outfit that has a skeleton formation of old Regular Army men for its core, as this outfit had, and which to the extent of the first verse runs like this:

Here come the doughboys
With dirt behind their ears!
Here come the doughboys—
Their pay is in arrears.
The cavalree, artilleree, and the lousy engineers—
They couldn't lick the doughboys
In a hundred thousand years.

To the swinging lilt of the air the column angled past where my cart was halted; and as it passed, the official minstrel of the company was moved to deliver himself of another verse, evidently of his own composition and dealing in a commemorative fashion with recent sentimental experiences. As I caught the lines and set them down in my notebook they were:

Here go the doughboys—
Good-bye, you little dears!
Here go the doughboys—
The girls is all in tears!
The june ferns and the gossongs
And the jolly old mong peres—
Well, they wont fur git the doughboys
For at least a hundred years!

The troubadour with his mates rounded the outjutting corner of the church beyond the shrine, and I became aware of a highly muddied youngster who sat in a cottage doorway with his legs extending out across the curbing, engaged in literary labours. From the facts that he balanced a leather-backed book upon one knee and held a stub of a pencil poised above a fair clean page I deduced that he was posting his diary to date. Lots of the American privates keep war diaries—except when they forget to, which is oftener than not.

Three months before, or possibly six, the boy in the doorway would have been a strange figure in a strange setting. About him was scarce an object, save for the shifting figures of his own kind, to suggest the place whence he hailed. The broom that leaned against the wall alongside him was the only new thing in view. It was made of a sheaf of willow twigs bound about a staff. The stone well curb ten feet away was covered with the slow lichen growth of centuries. The house behind him, to judge by the thickness of its thatched and wattled roof and by the erosions in its three-foot walls of stone, had been standing for hundreds of years before the great-granddaddies of his generation fought the Indians for a right to a home site in the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies.

But now he was most thoroughly at home—and looked it. He spoke, addressing a companion stretched out upon the earth across the narrow way, and his voice carried the flat, slightly nasal accent of the midwestern corn-lands:

“Say, Murf, what's the name of this blamed town, anyhow?”

“Search me. Maybe they ain't never named it. I know you can't buy a decent cigarette in it, 'cause I've tried. The 'Y' ain't opened up yet and the local shops've got nothin' that a white man'd smoke, not if he never smoked again. What difference does the name make, anyway? All these towns are just alike, ain't they?”