From Chaumont we marched north for four days to the Montdidier sector. I never shall forget this march. Spring was on the land, the trees were budding, wild flowers covered the ground, the birds were singing. Our dusty brown column wound up hill and down, through patches of woods and little villages. By us, all day, toward the south streamed the French refugees from villages threatened, or already taken, by the Hun. Heavy home-made wagons trundled past, drawn by every kind of animal, and piled high with hay and farm produce, furniture, and odds and ends of household belongings. Tramping beside them or riding on them were women and children, most of them dazed and with a haunted look in their faces. Sometimes the wagons would be halted and their occupants squatted by the road, cooking a scanty meal from what they had with them. To us in this country, thanks to Providence, not to our own forethought or character, this description is only so many words. Unless one has seen it, it is impossible to visualize the battered village, the column of refugees that starts at each great battle and streams ceaselessly toward Paris and southern France, the apple orchards and gardens torn beyond recognition, the desolation and destruction seemingly impossible of reparation. Nothing would have been better for our countrymen and women than for each and every one of them to have spent some time in the war zone. When I think of men of the type of Bryan and Ford, when I think of their self-satisfied lives of ease, when I think of what they did to permit disaster and death to threaten this country, it makes me wonder more than ever at the long-suffering kindness of humanity which permits such as they still to enjoy the benefits of citizenship in this great land which they have so signally failed to serve. When we took over the Montdidier sector it was not, nor did it ever become, the type found in the parts of the front where warfare had been going on without movement for more than three years. Trenches were shallow and scanty, and dugouts were almost lacking. Indeed, from this time on, with one exception, the division never held an established sector. The line at Montdidier had been established shortly after the break-through by the Germans, by a French territorial division which was marching north, expecting to relieve some friendly troops in front of it. They suddenly encountered, head on, the German columns that were marching south. Both sides deployed, went into position, and dug in where they were. The First Division took over from these troops.