people who can make a joke of it-a people who have such a sense of the picturesque that they sound the most dismal of sirens at the beginning of an airraid, and then play the silver notes of a rollicking bugle-call for "Cease Firing" when it is over.

In a vaudeville theatre at one of the ports there was a comedian who had an act which he called "Le Nouvel Uniforme." He wore a French steel helmet topped with the cock-feathers of the Italians. His coat and breeches were of khaki. About his waist was slung a Scotch sporran. He wore golf-stockings. The top of one was the pattern of the French flag and the other of the American flag. And he sang a song about the beach at Waikiki-a Frenchman's interpretation of an American idea of Hawaiian harmony! Certainly nothing could have been more Allied.

"Voilà les Américains!" is the title of a poster which is displayed on every Paris hoarding. It shows the German Crown Prince holding a crowbar with which he is trying to force open the door of Paris. He has turned from his task with an expression of acute anxiety, for on the wall beside him is the gigantic shadow of an American soldier. When you remember the confidence with which the Kaiser's heir proclaimed his intentions on Paris, there is something rather splendid about such a simple and direct method of jeering.

One night the sirens sounded as a group of American soldiers walked home along one of the broad avenues. They sauntered on as the few dim lights along the street were extinguished. Presently the boom of the barrage came from the direction of the front. Then the shots sounded nearer and against the sky were the bursts like fireflies. The Americans stopped to watch it and they were still watching as the flashes crept higher and higher toward the zenith. When the firing was thickestand when shrapnel was likely to drop on the pavements beside them, they stepped back into a doorway. As they stood there two figures came toward them. A French officer was striding along with his cape flung across the shoulders of a girl. They were keeping step as they hummed the gayest chorus from one of the revues. The Americans watched them walking

along, as debonairly as if there weren't a Boche on the same planet with them.

"I suppose she thinks she can't get hurt under that cape of his," said one of the Americans. "Gee! That's the way to take it, ain't it?"

To be able to see humor in the face of danger is a trait which the Americans share with their French comrades. A detachment of Americans were receiving their baptism of shell-fire. People say that it affects men differently. This is what it did to that outfit:

They stood on a knoll on the lee side of a shell-marked building and greeted each shot with: "Oh, why don't you put it over the middle of the plate?" "Get somebody that knows how to shoot!" and "Who ever told you that you knew how to aim a gun?”

Considering that the shots were landing in the next field, not a hundred yards away, and that any one of them would have levelled the house which gave the only protection in the neighborhood, it seemed that the Boche's intention of frightening fresh troops was not meeting with great success.

May there be no feeling that in what has been set down here the lighter side has been overstressed. If there is so much of the divine spark in those men overseas that they can see and feel the full horror of war and still laugh, will any one grudge them the privilege? Understand the kindliness of their humor, the fellowship and sympathy of it, contrast it with the grisly emotion which passes for mirth in their enemies, and then you will see how these soldiers of democracy can march for days and nights and then swing into the battle-line with a song on their lips. Whatever their hardships and danger, a laugh is never far away.

A group of Americans were marvelling at the cultivation of the French fields about them. They were discussing seriously the problems that face a country in which the man-power has been drained by four years of war. It was the kind of thoughtful talk that marks the progress of the Americans through France.

"How in the world are the French going to harvest their grain?" one man asked.

"Oh, they are going to let the Germans shell it!" was the answer.

ANTIL the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the two Caucasian fronts, that of Persia and that of Erzeroom, in the December of last year, the Caucasian problem had nothing in it to distinguish it from the general problem of Greater Russia in relation to the war. Throughout the period when the temporary Russian government under Kerenski was endeavoring to secure a stiffening of the Russian efforts against Germany, the Caucasian fronts remained strong and unbroken, and even at their weakest moment in the late autumn of 1917, when Bolshivikism was making its inroads among the troops, the military power which the armies on these fronts represented was sufficient to warn off any ambitious attempts of the Turks. It was when Bolshivikism had gained control in

the centre of Russia itself, and the influence of Kerenski had vanished, that the Russian troops, gathering up all that they could bear away with them, strode back to Russia and left the Caucasus with its few included nations to take care of itself. Till that time the Caucasus had been Russia; but from the moment of that desertion the Caucasus became an entity by itself with a problem of its own, and a danger of its own.

In the Great War, however, no European peoples can be entirely isolated. The fact that the Caucasus had in itself a particular value for both the Allied Powers and Germany brought its own problem into the general problem which belonged to both sides in the world struggle.

The individual problem of the Caucasus was racial. Within the mountainous area of the country live the three jarring races

themselves from the Persian and Turkish fronts, there arose a certainty of internal war to be complicated as certainly by the coming of the Turkish armies across the undefended fronts.

Now the pointing of this state of affairs was very clear to each of the peoples. While the Turks would come as a natural ally of their co-religionists and blood-relatives, the Tartars, the Armenians and Georgians would have to fall back upon their own resources. Left to themselves, therefore, the two Christian races would have been in such a position of difficulty that it is more than probable that the peace which the Russian Bolshiviki had made with the Turks on behalf of the

especially Great Britain, for through the way of the Caucasian valleys lay an open road to Persia and India, which, once in the hands of the Turks, would give all the access needed by Germany for threatening the flank of the British operations in Mesopotamia and gaining opportunity to interfere with affairs in India. Moreover, the natural resources of Caucasia were in themselves of vast value to either side in the war. For the Allies therefore to have left the Caucasus to take care of itself was impossible from the first signs of the retreat of the Russian armies. In whatever could happen, following upon that retreat, without some sort of definite Allied interference, the country would fall

into the hands of the Germans. It was quite certain that the Germans would have little care for the terms of their Russian compact of peace, and that with the Turks in possession of the treaty-given places of Kars and Batum, the Germans would utilize the country and its resources for their own particular benefit.

In this way the problem of the Armenians and Georgians, faced with their difficulty of opposing a combination of Turks and Tartars, became a problem as well for the Allies. The interest of the Allies necessitated an arming of the Armenians and the Georgians for a successful defense of the Caucasus, without and within, against any eventualities which could give the Germans access to the country. For the Armenians and Georgians any help which could strengthen them to meet the narrower problem of themselves against Tartars and Turks would be acceptable.

In the month of December, 1917, then, during the first beginnings of the Russian retreat from the Persian and Turkish fronts, representatives of the Allied nations were busy in Tiflis, the capital of the Caucasus, encouraging the Armenians and Georgians to arm for the purpose of taking the places of the retreating Russians on the two deserted fronts. Everything

seemed at that time to be favoring a success to the movement. The vast stores of military materials which the Russians had collected in the Caucasian bases-ammunition, guns, clothing, food, horses, trains, everything, indeed, essential to such preparations-fell into the hands of the Armenians through their possession of the main town centres. Behind them stood the representatives of the Allies with advice and promises, so that there seemed to be no doubt at all that within the necessary time, of some two months, there would be both an army of these two Caucasian peoples ready, and money and leadership, which the Allies had given them the assurance of immediately sending, there at hand to consolidate a substantial opposition to any hopes the Turks might have of being able to advance and make the Caucasus their own.

In the month of January of this year the situation which, if it had been left alone by the Allies, might have been turning to the advantage of the Tartars and Turks, had thus taken a turn so much in the opposite direction that the Tartars' position was already becoming the one of difficulty and danger. For the Tartars within the Caucasus the rise of the Armenians to power meant a real national dan