and groups meet and pass on, one wonders casually how so many of the men happened to marry such young wives. Another thought, and I look closer and know the truth. In the instant of meeting the wives have banished the hunted, gnawing fear and their faces have become young. But the men are young only behind their faces. Four years of this terrible work has trebled the ravages which time would have demanded of that period.

Now and then two gaunt trenchmen come out arm in arm, they are always in twos, unshaven, with mud but scraped from their clothes, reckless-looking, more deeply lined than the rest, and almost always with glittering croix de guerre pinned on their discolored tunics. Some have the caps of Zouaves, and they look about them only with curiosity. There is no one to meet them. Two such giants stopped near me terrible men, who might have been welcomed as worthy additions to the crew of Henry Morgan himself. I wondered upon what wild revels they would launch, and listened. "Que voulez-vous? Un cinema?' 'Mais oui, c'est très bien.' And out they trudged.

I turned to go and then wished I had not, for I almost stumbled over a very tiny boy, clad in a dirty blue smock, who at this instant reached up to a bigbearded poilu, and said, in a halfunderstanding voice, as if he had been told to say it, 'Maman est morte.' The poilu looked at me, or rather beyond me, took the tiny hand held out to him, and went out into the street with no word, no change of expression.

I was used to the sight of the women who slipped away alone, but this was a reversal of tragedy which was not in the routine of the ruck of war. I wondered whether hereafter the bearded poilu would return, heedless of his appearance, and would go to a cinema

with some lonely comrade. I have never been back to the Gare de l'Est and I do not wish to, but I should like to have every slacker, every pacifist, every doubter of the necessity of pushing the war through to a complete decision, look into the eyes of these soldiers. Their bodies are weary, their souls firmer than ever.

III

These are some of the direct objec tive reflections of the struggle waged from the two opposing lines of ditches, a few miles to the north. Between flights and my visits to the Front, I watched Paris obliquely, from a corner of my eye, and at times almost forgot the war in the great joy of little things. One day I remember as being particularly rich in small adventures.

After an unusually high and futile flight I motored back to Paris one gray morning, and was seized with the desire to visit my old stamping grounds in the Jardin des Plantes. Six years ago, in happier times, I had trudged day after day between the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle and the Hôtel Lutetia. until I knew every rue and alley by heart. And now in the Parc Zoologique I found curiously accurate reflections of national conditions outside.

I was greeted by a most forlorn moulting stork, who sadly clattered his beak, appearing the very embodiment of hopelessness. Indeed, for most of his class he was a true prophet, for I found the birds to be in scant numbers and of very ordinary interest. A peacock in a high tree made repeated feints and false starts at flight. He was facing the east and may have had it in mind to depart this dreary France and seek his native Indian terai. A marabou stood listlessly and tore off bits of bark, champing them with closed eyes as if imagining a poisson

délicieusement ancien; its mate, however, making no effort to share in this power of will, shivered in hunched-up misery, as if fully convinced of the error of existence.

Passing cages and aviaries, rusty and untenanted, I found an abundance of gulls and birds of prey. These could exist on fish-heads and offal, and so had proved themselves the fit ones to survive in this new critical phase of life. Some of the African eagles were in excellent condition. An emaciated lezard ocelle and a small boa wandering about its cage were the only reptiles in sight. As in the case of birds, the meateating mammals were in the majority, although deer and antelopes were devouring carrot-parings and the wilted tops of greens. The vultures and hyenas appeared the best fed and most contented natives of France that I had seen. When there appeared a big haunch of horse-meat which no censor would have passed, the hyenas grinned horribly and the vultures hissed, with at least the incentive to think with satisfaction, 'C'est la guerre!'

My last glance at the menagerie showed a big black curassow on a perch snuggled close up to an Australian crested pigeon - the sole inmates of a large inclosure; and this brought vividly to my mind an association of corresponding nationalities which I had observed the night before on the Boulevard des Italiens - an American and an Anzac trudging arm-in-arm and turning finally into one of those phonograph places in which the French delight. I watched them through the window, and soon saw them seated side by side, with tubes to ears in attitudes of rapt attention, one with a blissful smile, the other with a puzzled expression of impatience. I entered and saw that they were absorbing the auricular vibrations of Harry Lauder and the crashing overture to an Italian opera.

The Australian and the man from Maine the curassow and the pigeon; again, c'est la guerre which makes strange companions!

I later attended a meeting of the Société Nationale d'Acclimatation, and was profoundly impressed by the spirit of these few elderly scientists. With all the young men dead or at the front, they were yet striving with all their might to keep up the spirit of scientific research, so that, in this as in other fields, après la guerre, France may have something of a flying start to maintain her place in the domain of science. Old men of the past generation had renewed their life-interests and argued politely and volubly about the possibilities of the introduction of certain new exotic plants and birds. It was a wholly futile discussion by a score of brave French gentlemen, and affected me as does a remnant of a Zouave regiment in a passing parade.

It was late afternoon when I came out upon the street, and the low winter sun was pale through the mist, while overhead was the strangely unfamiliar sight of blue sky. I stopped in an old book-shop on rue Hautefeuille, which had no sense of the war. It was an old, old publishing house, and on the shelves were sets of Buffon still tied up in ancient packets and for sale at the same prices which they brought so many years ago, when the type was fresh from the press. After considerable argument I succeeded in purchasing a classic work on spiders which I had long desired. This was indeed a most modern publication for this establishment, as it appeared only two decades ago. The kindly old man was persuaded that I was laboring under some delusion, and that an American aviator could have no use for any Études des Araignées. He seemed to fear that I had been injured in the head as well as the wrist, and his last

reassuring words were that, if I found the work to be not the one I wished, I was to return it without hesitation. Without doubt my transaction did not tend to clarify one Frenchman's idea of American participation in the war.

Turning homewards, I walked slowly, with thoughts of my spider volumes and their quaint memories still dominant. Then I caught sight of a little Frenchwoman whom I had seen in the Jardin des Plantes. She was very aged and very crooked, and she hobbled pitifully along in a huge pair of soldier's brogans. A long black veil trailed from her faded bonnet, and as she walked ahead of me I could see that it was a mosaic of three bits of crape. Her face was wreathed and wrinkled, but in her wizened cheeks was still a suspicion of color, and in her manner the quick femininity which often survives all other characteristics in the tragic women of France.

In the Jardin I had stood near and watched her throw a few crumbs from the bottom of her bag to a brown peahen. She was talking to the bird and I caught, 'Vous avez faim comme moi'; and later, 'Mais vous avez votre mari.' Not until now had I realized the extreme poverty, the thinness of the shoes, the scantiness of her clothing.

I reached her and spoke: 'Permettez moi, madame-pour plus de pains pour les oiseaux; j'aime les oiseaux; je suis un naturaliste!'

For a moment I thought she would refuse my offering; but with a graceful courtesy she accepted the little deception. 'Vous êtes plus qu'un naturaliste'; and I forgot the gracious language and murmured something harsh and bromidic in English and passed on swiftly. As I turned into another street I looked up and saw by the shining blue sign that I was leaving the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.

My next little adventure befell on

the Pont Neuf, and was delightful in its spontaneity. A push-cart, or rather pull-cart, heavily laden with apples, passed me, with a smocked peasant and a big shaggy dog in the traces. I was nibbling a piece of chocolate, the greatest delicacy which Paris can afford in these days, and I idly snapped my fingers at the dog and held out the cake. With hardly a moment's hesitation the great black beast backed out of his collar, and came leaping toward me, tail waving frantically as a friendly countersign. I was so surprised that I gave him the whole cake, which he took gently, bolted whole, and returning, half leaped upon the toiling man, with a lick or two at his hands. Then, dropping back, the dog nuzzled the dangling, partly closed collar until his nose worked its way inside, then with a forward rush slipped it over his head. The tail sank at once to half-mast, and straining steadily outward and forward, the dear beast voluntarily assumed his full share of the labor.

The whole incident hardly seemed real, so used are we Americans to dogs as friends and not as draft animals. The man gave me a smile and a low 'Merc'm's'u,' and I knew that he must be a good man who could possess such a dog. I thought of the dog I had seen near the front with its leg in a sling; of the police dogs; of the adored canine mascot of Paderewski's Polish regiment, and of a score of others; then of the hundreds of horses pulling the guns to the front and suffering hunger and often death with their masters. And it became clearer than ever before who were man's best friends on the earth. Cows give their milk and hens lay eggs. but so does a sausage-machine produce for man uncountable links. In a time of stress like the present, those creatures, catwise, walk alone, and are rather organic machines than friends.

The Seine was flooded, with the water lapping the walls and near the danger-mark, and in the dim light I sat in an embrasure and watched the last of the ancient fishers cast from the stone steps a last cast, and then unjoint their rods and start for home. Automatically searching for planes, my eye caught a great eagle, high in air, still in full sunlight, circling around and around over the great city, whose streets were merging into the same dismal half-lighting which must have characterized them in medieval times. Thus ended one of my days of small adventure.

IV

Then came the time of the great adventure- the night raid by sixty Gothas. Like the low distant rumbling presaging an approaching storm, or the whine of an oncoming shell, I had been hearing on every front the persistent, muttered rumors of a night raid on Paris. For over a year there had been some kind of tacit understandingthat, if the French would leave the German towns alone, Paris would remain inviolate; and rumor had it that this would soon end. Then one day appeared a casual half-column in the papers, almost apologetic, from the Prefect of Police, recalling the more important regulations in case of the 'very unlikely occasion of a raid.' A few days later, on another front, two Boche airmen were taken, and I heard them boast of their three hundred planes which were to smother Paris with gas-bombs. This continual reiteration sharpened the channels of sense, and, night after night, between trips to the Front I was awakened by screeching taxi-horns, and sat up listening. Once, several screams aroused me to a realization that it was only a small

the kindly dense mist enfolded the great, darkened, saddened city in a blanket camouflage of safety.

One afternoon I visited a wellbeloved general in the hospital where he was recovering from a wound. With characteristic altruism, he made no comment on his own miraculous escape, but grieved only for the terrible death of the splendid French officers and men, who were standing in front and whose bodies had saved the lives of our Americans. As I was leaving he said jokingly, 'Well, it will be my luck now to have the Boche raid Paris to-night.'

I went out and wandered across the Seine, up boulevard Saint-Germain and rue Monge to rue des Arènes. The name conveyed nothing unusual to me, until I turned a corner and saw for the first time the old Roman amphitheatre. Before one reaches the corner, there is nothing to be seen but a great front of very ordinary buildings-rather cheap flats, with dismal shops beneath. Skirting the end of these, I saw that they were but of cardboard thickness, a single room's width, like the prow of the flatiron building. Immediately behind was the little park enclosing the amphitheatre; and I walked across the old arena, sat on the rows of mossy stone seats, and watched the sparrows feeding on crumbs of war-bread which a poilu and his wife threw to them.

Suddenly these sparrows (dingy little feathered replicas of their brethren in our own parks) assumed a new importance and I looked at them with renewed interest. Fifteen hundred years ago, when these same seats were occupied by Romans and Gauls waiting for the coming of the beasts and the gladiators, the far-distant ancestors of these sparrows hopped about and chirped in this self-same arena, quite unchanged, quite as dingy, seeking the bits of food which might fall from patrician or ple

beian. The little 1918 birds linked me closely with the past centuries, going about their daily business regardless of wars and the passing of peoples, stuffing the unkempt bundle of straw which they call home, with yearly regularity and perennial equanimity, in a crevice of the amphitheatre, beneath a NotreDame gargoyle, or in the rusting framework of a fallen aeroplane. My mind drifted easily to memory of the calmness of distant jungles, of the myriads of tropical blossoms just opening, and there came to my ear the humming of lazy, yellow-thighed bumble-bees. Then I glanced upward, to where a French biplane drew slowly across a bit of blue sky, and filled the air with its twanging hum.

After dinner I walked up the avenue de l'Opéra, in a light mist, with the moon striving to shine through, and, tired out from my week in the trenches, turned in at once in my comfortable room in the American University Union.

It was before midnight when the wailing moan of sirens brought me to my senses, and I heard two fire-engines race past, filling the air with this, the most fearsome of all noises of human manufacture. Then, from the street below, I heard an American voice call out,' 'Put out that light in 103, damn quick!' Half-dressed, I went into the hall and joined a group of American officers, and by common consent we went to the front balcony of the room of a Cornell lieutenant, who assured us it was the best seat in the house. We crowded close together for sight and for warmth and waited for the performance to begin. •

The reaction from warm beds demanded a forced gayety, and we cheered as the first star-rockets went up. Then the quick winking flash of shrapnel sobered us, and we listened to the bark of anti-aircraft guns from the Tour Eiffel and elsewhere. The lop-sided

moon looked down calmly on it all, as undisturbed as I had seen it silvering the jungle, or as it illumined the earth before the first man stood upright or fashioned speech.

The stars were out, and to those fixed constellations were added numerous green and white comets and steadily unwinking planets which throbbed across the heavens - French planes patrolling all heights. Then the gunfire grew louder, and occasionally a staccato mitrailleuse spoke out viciously. Then the bombs began — distant, deeper, still more ominous notes in this celestial overture; and at last came the unmistakable humming of a Boche plane. Nothing could be seen against the blue-black sky, but we knew it was close overhead. Instinctively we drew back. Personally I felt more conspicuous than I can remember; my halfdraped figure seemed the focus of the whole sky.

Without further warning a great orange gleam shot up a few blocks away and the deep smothered boom of a bomb shook every window. This sent us back to our rooms, where we dressed as best we could and went downstairs. Two more bombs were heard; then a white-faced little Frenchman ran in and incoherently told of having trod on things which he found were legs, and not with their body. We started out, and a few minutes away came to an American ambulance in which two bodies had just been placed. The bomb had fallen inside a house, and a soldier and a civilian had been killed in the street. Broken glass was everywhere.

Again came the humming, and we all moved along restlessly. Two of us agreed that the open Tuileries Gardens sounded most healthy, and off we set. A great red glow showed where a fire had started somewhere in the suburbs.

Then I saw something which perhaps meant more to me than to the