Then the fog closed in, a thick, impenetrable fog, and that’s all I know or ever will know of Chaumont, as I’m going back to Paris _via_ Nancy. So be it. On a nearby new railroad embankment, the figure of a _poilu_—the classic figure—the coat pinned back from his knees, bayoneted rifle over his shoulder, loomed up immeasurably large in the fog, while he watched the labors of a lusty, husky set of German prisoners, the familiar “P.G.”[3] stamped on their backs. A little farther along was another laughing, rosy-faced group of four of the same, watched over by one of their own under-officers. I could only see his field-gray back stamped with his P.G., but as his men were so unrestrainedly hilarious, there is no reason to suppose that _he_ was frowning. _4 o’clock, Culmont-Chalindrey._—Already three hours late. Fog-enveloped train of box cars filled with slightly wounded doughboys peering through the narrow slit at the top, bandaged eyes, noses, the same kind of groups looking out of the door. Suddenly everything seems dreary. I am tired, and wonder why, oh! why I came, and if the war is going to last forever and forever, and it is the hour of the day when those who have not slept the night before know profound discouragement and the noonday devil has ceased to walk, flicking his whip. _Vitrey._—Station full of Americans and wood—wood—wood, as if every tree in France had been cut. “Wood by the pound is how you buy it over here, all the same,” disdainfully remarked the Minnesotan artilleryman serving in the Texan regiment, as we stood looking out of the window. And if the journey down seems long, remember that life, too, is made up of wearisome and long things—that it is indeed but a pilgrimage, and mostly through a land more desert than this of Burgundy. And in the end this book may justify itself, though of that I know as little as you. At Vitrey there is a detachment of mustard-tinted, khaki-clad, red-_checchiaed_ Moroccan _tirailleurs_, exceedingly exotic-appearing, sitting on their accoutrement or leaning against the bare scaffolding of a new addition to the station. There came into my mind what an unwed friend told me of a conversation with a dying _tirailleur_, to whom she was giving a _tisane_ in a long, dim, hospital room at two o’clock in the morning. He looked at her and said suddenly in his strange French: “Woman, I know thy look; thou and many like thee have not been embraced in love. In my village thou wouldst be a grandmother” (I had never thought of her as old, but the _tirailleur_ knew that, as the men of his race rated women, she was old—old, and no one would have followed her to the well.) He continued: “If no man is to enfold thee, why not be as those of the great white coifs, who have given themselves to Allah? They have not thy look.” Then he went into delirium and cried out in his own tongue and picked at his sheet, and when she came that way again he was dead.