Hospital visiting is dreary work, especially when there is action going on from which one is separated. The work is exhausting physically, walking up and down the long wards and stopping by bedsides. It is especially a drain on the nerves and sympathies, to see so many sick and mutilated boys--boys in age most of them, certainly boys in spirit--and giving oneself as the need arises. And in a hospital so many men have requests. They are helpless and it is always impossible to have enough visitors and enough chaplains for them. I was glad to be useful at Treport but gladder still when the word came through to release all troops in the Second Corps Replacement Depot. We were loaded on a train, the soldiers in box-cars of the familiar type ("40 men or 8 horses") with the little group of officers crowded together in a single first-class coach. Broken windows, flat wheels and no lights showing--we were beginning to feel that we were in the war zone. From Eu to Peronne took from 4:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. with three changes of trains and ten additional stops. We got only a short view of the railroad station at Amiens, at that time almost completely destroyed. Our division was then in the British area on the Somme sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the great victory at the Hindenburg Line. Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. And Peronne was much more striking than most cities in the war zone; it had been fought through six different times, and its originally stately public buildings showed only enough to impress us with the ruin that had been wrought. Only one wall of one end of the church was standing, with two fine Gothic arches, only one side of the building on the square and so on through the whole town. We became inured to the sight of ruined villages later on, but the first shock of seeing Peronne will be indelible.