Page:Armistice Day.djvu/214

192 visit to him he leaned slightly back in his armchair, lit his pipe, and said:

"America! She knows all I feel for her. She knows that my affection equals my admiration.... I thought I had understood her well during the war, because I had seen her soldiers fight beside our own. But I understood her even better during peace when I crossed the ocean to visit her and when, during six weeks, I traveled across her vast territory. The cheers which rang along my way, I scarcely heard them then. My mind was elsewhere. I was ever recurring to this same idea:

"Four years ago men went away from here. They made the same great voyage which I have just accomplished to go and fight on the edge of a ditch of the Meuse or the Marne. It was because an idea great as the world had inspired them; it was because an immense wave of idealism and fraternity had brought them from all corners of their vast continent to fight on our soil. And then I said to myself that this wave should not be allowed to withdraw, nor to dry up. I said to myself that, at all costs, idealism and brotherhood must remain the link which joins America and France forever!"

I ventured to say:

"People should understand one another, sir, and one must know how to command—"