_6 P.M., Vesoul Station._—Writing by the light that comes in from the gas-jet. Dim American forms silhouetted in the great station. Partake of the loneliness that possesses the soul of American youth in France on a foggy autumn night. One of them said to me to-day, with a curious, dulled look in his eye, a brooding, neurasthenic eye, “I’m the kind that gets killed the last day of the war.” Then a presence apparent only by the light of his cigarette, a being with an accent not immediately placeable, half cockney, half Middle-West, calls out, “Say, does anybody know when we pull into Belfort?” It had, all the same, something of confidence-inspiring, so I briskly chirped up: “Oh, in an hour or two or three.” “Well, I took the eight-o’clock train from Paris last night.” Chorus: “You mean this morning?” “I mean last night, and going ever since.” “What have you been doing in between times?” “Going, going,” he answered, casually, “and as you see, going still!” “How did you manage to get on this train?” “I don’t know. There I was and here I am, and God knows where my kit is. I’m a flier, and I’ve got to have my things,” he ended, rather irritably, and then there was another conversation about “burning the Rhine.” After interminable hours—two of them—we came to Lure, and everybody seemed to be getting out, even the woman in purple, and there was a fumbling with pocket-lamps and the voice of my country crying, “Where’s that d—— door, anyway?” The young man who started last night came into my compartment as the train jerked out of the station, and he was a Canadian aviator _en route_ for the big camp of the Royal Independent Air Corps at Chatenoir. Before the war he had been a chartered accountant. “But,” he said, “once in the air, never again can I sit at a desk, crushed in by four walls.” And he told stories of hair-breadth escapes of himself and his comrades, and of combats in the air—once he had had his knee broken—and then he suddenly cried out in a sharp voice: “God! I’m tired! Somebody let me know if we ever get there,” and flung himself in a corner, and went to sleep, I hope. A young American officer standing smoking in the corridor, with whom I had sat at lunch, turned on his pocket-lamp for an instant during the ensuing silence, and said, “Do you mind if I come in?” Then, in the pitch darkness, lighting one cigarette from the other, and very lonely, I think, he almost immediately began to talk about himself, and his story might be called the story of the young man who was and wasn’t married.