The buses arrived and all night we jolted southwest through the forest of Chantilly. By morning we arrived and detrucked and the brown columns wound through the fresh green landscape to the charming little gray stone towns. The town where we were to stay was called Ver. It was built on rolling country and its gray cobble-paved streets twisted and wound up hill and down through a maze of picturesque gray houses in whose doors well-dressed, bright-cheeked women and children stood watching us. On the hill were the remains of an old wall and château, and at the foot, through a broad meadow shaded with trees, a fair-sized brook rippled. Jean Jacques Rousseau lived and wrote there. How he could have been such a hypocrite and have lived in such a charming place is more than I can see. The men were delighted. "Say, Buddie, this is some town; look at that stream!"--"Bonne billets."--"Let's fight the rest of the war here"--were some of the remarks I heard as the column swung in. Everything was ideal. The stream above mentioned furnished a bathtub for the command. We had had no opportunity for about two months to thoroughly bathe, as we had been on active work the entire time, and you can imagine in just what condition we were. To put it in the words of one of my company commanders, "The command was as lousy as pet coons." The first day we spent in orienting ourselves, getting the kitchens arranged and the billets comfortable. Meanwhile the troops were down bathing in the stream, to the admiring interest of the French inhabitants, who lined the bridge. To our staid Americans the unconventional attitude of interest in bathing troops displayed by the French inhabitants of all ages and both sexes was a source of constant embarrassment. I have known a platoon sergeant to guide his men to quite a distant point to take their baths. When I asked him why, he replied, "Sir, it isn't decent with all them frogs looking on." That evening, at officers' meeting, everyone was on the crest of the wave, "sitting on the world," as the doughboy puts it. The officers established their mess in various houses, and I remember to this day Lieutenant Kern, as gallant an officer as ever it was my pleasure to know, who was mortally wounded some three days from this time, telling me that they had the prettiest French girl in all of France as a waitress at his company mess and that they were all going to give her lessons in English. We talked over training and made all arrangements for a long stay. The only dissenting voice was that of the medical officer, Captain E. D. Morgan. He, Cassandra-like, prophesied that the town was too nice and we would be moved soon.