does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may die
for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing that
they should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others.
But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry
and me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the
Armenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerage
and all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the
drill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army
and avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling,
they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It was
queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. It
was written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and broken
time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had the
charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the
strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.

"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy in
khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano.
"That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that's
the 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax and he went away
whistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with their
idea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music,
the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins
from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their
striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across
the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its
essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each
cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind.
And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love
one's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind