In the early evening we arrived at Bar-le-Duc, a sweet little city built round the famous old château on the hill. As we drove through the streets I was struck by the sign "Câve," "Câve Voutée," or "Câve, 12 hommes," printed on the fronts of the houses. All places of shelter from bombs were clearly marked. Turning a corner we came upon a building in ruins. Then upon one with a hole in the roof. Bar-le-Duc had not escaped the enemies' ravages. There we spent the night. The next day we lunched at St. Menehould, then went out into the Argonne itself. Oh, I can't describe it! Think of cultivated fields giving way to vast rank stretches; ditches and shell holes everywhere; rusty, tangled barbed wire on all sides; miles and miles of broken, sagging telephone wires; pathetic pulverized villages, scarcely discernible on the plain; tops of hills sawed off and furrowed by shell fire; lonely wooden crosses dotting the fields everywhere; refuse of all kinds along the roadside--a man's puttee, a wrecked automobile, rusty iron, a rifle belt, piles of unexploded shells; and signs in French and English bearing severe traffic orders spoke eloquently of the mad congestion on the roads, now so lonely. This whole immense silence and desertion told of pressing crowds, of fierce exertion, of wild excitement, of cursing and of praying, of roaring and blazing and dying. Eight months ago it was hell on fire. And now there was not a soul in sight, nor a sound. The hot sun beat on it all. Now and then came a fetid odor that turned you sick. The war is over. Stopping at a prison camp for gasoline, a lieutenant came up to me, and seeing the lightning streak on my shoulder he told me that he too belonged to the 78th and remembered meeting me last winter. He offered to take me and whoever else was interested through the wood of Ardennes where the 78th had fought in October. You can imagine I was glad to go. So I have seen the scarred and blasted woods and ravines through which my boys panted and bled and kept on. I seemed to almost live through it with them, and I felt the exhilaration of battle more than the horror, and wished fervently that I could have been a man fighting with them. We came to a place where the Germans had blown up two engines. Right there Lieut. S. said the 311th had its supply dump. And sure enough, on a tree I saw the good old Lightning Sign! I took it down, for I know the boy who made all the signs, and intend to give it to some one for a souvenir. But to skip over more quickly, we spent that night at Romagne, where the great American-Argonne cemetery is being made. The next day we visited Grand Pré, the town which the 78th took; a terrible wreck, bearing the signs of hot street fighting, the standing walls being nicked and riddled with machine gun fire. Here again my spirit was back with my fighting boys reliving it all with them.