ABSTRACT
The men with George Poole met a shell-shocked Negro and were startled by his incoherence. Poole explained their surprise by saying this was their "first contact with the grim reality of the war we had come to fight." Gathered on the platform of the station, the Americans waited for the cloak-and-dagger game to go on, many of them feeling, like George Poole, that things were a little too melodramatic to be serious. The Americans were defended by a French Socialist lawyer, an adherent of the ideals of the Popular Front, who pleaded for clemency on the grounds of the nobility of their cause. The Americans crowded around the soldiers, who wore the red star of the Republic on their caps, and offered them cigarettes. The Americans left the fortress with little regret. Many, like Sam Levinger, had found it a "grim place," with its dungeon-like barracks and stinking latrines.
