Arizona republican., 1918-08-31
Seventh InstaIlment Chapter LII { Continuedl


 Seventh InstaIlment
 Chapter III { Continued)
 That evening at supper in Chalons | we met some American boys who said | that the French were selling this glass | from the windows of Rheims, made | from old beer bottles and blue bottles | and green bitters bottles. and stilll later we saw an English Colonel who had bought a job lot of it and found i patent medicine trade mark blown in a piece!
 We had been in the place but a few minutes. when we went to the back of the cathedral where we found an eX- cited old man on the sidewalk with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to Henry and sme, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the stone dust and spawI freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole in the pavement and then to a broken iron shell. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but a few minutes be- fore We came. We went into his shop to stock up on post cards. and as MAUI M LII puy anu MI. 4NOl loll, " lO could talk French. learned that another shell would be due in three or four minutes, we left town.
 The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden only, and at that rather poorly, by camou- flage-straw woven into mats, and bur | lap, badly torn. We were between the l German guns five miles away, and the ] sunset. Great holes i'll the ground be- side the road indicated where they | had been dropping shells, so our driver tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour and we skedaddled.
 The Valley of the Marne
 From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne, a most beautiful vineclad valley, where the road turns sharply from the Ger man lines and soon passes out of the German range and the shell holes al the side of the road disappear. But even shell holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley as we wound down into it from the | hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It gloWed |; with color. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the checkered | fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through the quaint little viii lages dashes of color seemed doused in our faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on their uniforms, black MorOccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous com binations of colors. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias-even the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the German villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan, from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the Germans themselves a few weeks later were. forced to flee, running pell- mell as they scurried be- fore the wrath of the French soldiers.
 The Emotions of France
 As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after divi- sion of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village. where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train Of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come from over the hills and far away but they are young. and the women are young and beautiful and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover, the emotions of France are tense Death, doubt, fear and hope lash the home staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day or an hour the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village, in the street in the home. Five millions of men during the last three years and q half have passed and repassed. through those fifty miles or so back of the fir ing line in which soldiers are quar- tered for rest, where in times of peace less than million men have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, dSplIl1lS NOIlltu tilhI oui NlNtS and sisters are, and the men are as , chivalrous and gentle and as kind. # it Were Wichita
 For nearly an hour we had been go- ing through these villages crowded with soldiers-kindly French soldiers who were clearly living happily with the people upon whom they were bil- l leted Then Henry burst forth, My good heavens man-what if this were in Wichita of Empora! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty [ fine soldiers in it. and we were away and our wives and daughters were l there alone? Thousands and thous- l ands of these young girls fitting about 5 here were just little children three l years ago when their daddies left What if in our streets soldiers were auartered by the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to dc but resti What would happen 1T Wichita and Emporia-or back east 1T I Goshen, New York, or out west ir Fresno or Tonopah? What an awful thing-what a hell in the earth, wal is,"
 And yet we know that young hearts f will express themselves as they were meant to express themselves even IT the rack and dun and waste of war And this strange picture of love and death sitting together some way re- minded us of the phloX and the dahlias