How can I ever begin to describe to you the sweetness and the fineness of our boys over here! I am proud, proud of America. I love the real spirit of her which these boys have preserved and strengthened in these little villages way off in France. You think I ought to work with children. But I tell you these boys are children; wonderfully powerful and dexterous children; and I play and work with them as though they were children, and we have had happy times together. I see now what there is for me to do. I pray that I may do it, in order to help them and be worthy of them during these difficult, tedious, dangerous days of waiting, with nothing to do. But to return to my nice M.P. with the bushy eyebrows. He got me an army car to take me to Sémur, with a soft-voiced Southerner to run it. It was a delightful ride of twenty miles or so through chilly country glistening with snow; and all the time the boy talked of home in Mississippi, and his mother, and what he wanted to do when he got back. He took me to the Y.M.C.A. headquarters at Sémur. There I met Mr. M. of Salem, Mass., who is my chief. It seems that Sémur is the centre of all Y.M.C.A. activities with the 78th Division which did much heroic fighting all along the front. Mr. M. is a delightful gentleman and a real man. He has been with the boys in the midst of the fighting. We had a good talk. He finally decided to send me to Pouillenay with the 2nd Battalion of the 311th Infantry, 78th Division. "This is an experiment, Miss Shortall," he said. "You will be the only American woman in the town. The town is off the main line and the boys have not had their share of comforts and amusements. The "Y" has run to the dogs. Everything is gloomy. Do you want the job?" I said it was just what I wanted. The next morning a nice "Y" man put me and my baggage into a car and ran me over to Pouillenay about ten miles over the hills. Pouillenay is a tiny, peaked-roofed village of mud and stones, with a river babbling through its centre where the women wash and the geese wade, and old stone bridges span it. All about are hills, lovely hills. In this French setting, place 1500 American boys in khaki! They are everywhere! The dazed and stupefied old natives wandering around in their wooden shoes are in the minority. The crooked streets resound to American voices, American jokes and songs, and huge U.S. trucks go thundering over the ancient cobblestones, while the insulted geese go to the side of the road looking so wrathfully dignified and stately that I laugh every time I see them, and the black and white speckled hens shriek and run for their lives in all directions, often into the houses whose doors are on the level with the street. This town was to be my home. I was left in the care of Lieutenant Robinson, who has been most kind to me, as every one else has been. (I'll send you descriptions of my friends here after I discover who censors the mail!)