invitation to join them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other if a third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre Nesle, and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du Louvre, which was filled with young men, whose faces I seemed to have seen before under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were typewriting as though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while they whistled the tune of "Madelon." Pierre was in his shirt-sleeves, dictating letters to a poilu in civil clothes.
"Considerable activity on the Western front, eh?" he said when he saw me.
"Tell me all about it, Pierre."
He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them—painters, poets, novelists, journalists—but the main body were simple soldiers animated by one idea—to prevent another war by substituting the commonsense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.
"How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?" I asked.
Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
"The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We've got beyond that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany, Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. Mon vieux, what has victory given to France? A great belt of devastated country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy,
