I felt little pleasure in the jollity of the evening, however. I had just received a letter that day telling me of the death of one of my twin babies of the flu; it had happened almost a month before, while I was on the lines and quite out of reach of any kind of word. The war, through its attendant epidemics, gathered its victims also from among the innocent, far from the scene of struggle. I felt then that my grief was but a part of the universal sacrifice. With all these other parents, whose older sons died at the front in actual fighting, or whose younger ones were caught denuded of medical protection at home, I hoped that all this sacrificial blood might bring an end to war. To-day that faith is harder and that consolation seems a mockery, for we seem to be preparing for another struggle even while children are dying of hunger in central Europe and massacres of helpless Jews are still not yet ended in the east. When I received the news I took a long walk amid the most peaceful scene I ever knew, up the tree-lined banks of the Somme Canal, with the evening slowly coming on and the sun setting behind the stiff rows of poplars. At last we were detached from the British Third Army and received orders to entrain for the American Embarkation Center (as it was later called) near Le Mans. Our headquarters there were in the village of Montfort, where we arrived on Thanksgiving Day and stayed for three weary months. Montfort le Routrou is a village of nine hundred people, with one long street which runs up the hill and down the other side. The hill is crowned with a typical village church and a really fine chateau, where the General made his headquarters. The tiny gray houses seemed all to date from the time of Henry of Navarre; my billet was a low cottage with stone walls over three feet thick, as though meant to stand a siege or to uphold a skyscraper. The floor was of stone, the grate large and fuel scarce, no artificial light available except candles. The bed alone was real luxury, a typical French bed, high, narrow and very soft--an indescribable treat to a man who had slept on everything from an army cot to a cellar floor.