Page:Armistice Day.djvu/152

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130
ARMISTICE DAY
 

train from Paris were a football crowd, except for their uniforms. In other Novembers you could have seen them on the New Haven express from the Grand Central.

Gently rounded hills rolled away on each side of us, brown under dying grass and red where plows had gashed them. Drowsy little French villages crumbled into the landscape, as much a part of it as groups of mossy bowlders. They had those chameleon roofs which are red in the sun and gray in the mist.

We stopped at an American hospital and talked with some of our own wounded and with German prisoners, the latter still nonplussed at receiving attentions so contrary to the predictions of their officers.

The heroism of the American soldier does not end when he is put out of action. He takes with him into the hospital all his self-abnegation, all his determination to keep helping it along. He knows that the sooner he gets back to the front the sooner the cause will have been won, and he recovers from sickness and wounds with remarkable obstinacy. The inconveniences of over-crowded or underequipped hospitals he takes with a grin. It is all in the game. One dough-boy, who felt that he was not badly enough hit to deserve an ambulance, walked twenty miles to a hospital with a bullet through his stomach. Of