The door opened and he was thankful to see that the soldier outside was not one of his particular friends. He was silently escorted to the wash room, in the doorway of which the guard waited while Tom refreshed himself after his sleepless night with a grateful bath.
The vessel, as he could see, was moored parallel with the abrupt brick shore of a very narrow canal, with somber, uninviting houses close on either hand. It was as if a ship were tied up along the curb of a street. Up and down the gang planks and back and forth upon the deck hurried men in blouses with great, clumsy wooden shoes upon their feet and now Tom saw the cause of that earsplitting clatter; and he knew that he had reached “over there.”
Down on the brick street below the ship, a multitude of children, all in wooden shoes, danced and clattered about, in honor of the ship’s arrival, and the windows were full of people waving the Stars and Stripes, calling “Vive l’Ameríque!” and trying, with occasional success, to throw loose flowers and little round potatoes with French and American flags stuck in them, onto the deck.
All of the houses looked very dingy and old, and the men in blouses who pushed their clods about on this or that errand upon the troopship, were old, too, and had sad, worn faces. Only the children were joyful.
As Tom went back along the deck, he glanced through a street which seemed to run almost perpendicularly up the side of a thickly built-up hill, and caught a passing glimpse of the open country beyond. France! He wondered whether the “front” were in that direction and how long it would take to get there, and what it looked like. It could not be so very far. Presently he heard a more orderly clatter of wooden shoes and he saw several of the soldiers, who had not yet gone ashore, hurry to the rail.
He did not dare to do that himself, but as he walked he ventured to verge a little toward the vessel’s side, and saw below several men in tattered, almost colorless uniforms, marching in line along the brick street, each with a wheelbarrow.
He heard a woman call something from a window in French.
“There’s discipline for you, all right,” a soldier said.
“You said it,” replied another; “it’s second nature with ’em.”
He gathered that the little procession of laborers were German prisoners, and that the long ingrained habit of marching in step had become so much a part of their natures that they did it now instinctively.