As we were moving back a day later an engineer officer rode up to me from the rear and told me he had just come from Second Division headquarters, where they had announced that the armistice had been signed and all hostilities were to cease at 11 o'clock that morning. I sent back word to the men. It was announced up and down the column and a few scattering cheers were all that greeted it. I don't think it really got through their heads what had happened. I know it had not got through mine. That night we stopped in the Bois de la Folie, and for the first time the men began to realize what had happened. Fires were lit all over. Around them men were gathered, singing songs and telling stories. It was very picturesque: the battered woods, the flaming fires, and the brown, mud-caked soldiers. The contrast was doubly great, as until that time no fires were lighted by the troops when anywhere near the front lines. German airplanes always came over and as the men expressed it, "laid eggs wherever they saw a light." The first thing that really brought it home to me personally was when a little military chauffeur came up through the dark and said, "Colonel, Mrs. Roosevelt is waiting in the car at the corner." I knew that no women had been anywhere near the front the day before. I realized that this really meant that the war was over. The car came up and skidded around in the deep mud. Mrs. Roosevelt was there in a pair of rubber boots. She had somehow managed to come because she wished to say good-by to me and return to our children in the United States now that the fighting was over. I went back with her some ten kilometers to a tent where some Y. M. C. A. men were giving out chocolates, crackers, etc. All the way back through the night the sky was lit by the fires of the men. On every side rockets were going up, like a Fourth of July celebration. Gas signals and barrage signals flashed over the tree tops. The whole thing seemed hardly possible. Although we had been there in France only a year and a half, it seemed as if the war had lasted interminably. It seemed as if it always had been and always would be with us. All our plans had been based on an indefinite continuation. I had been rather an optimist, and yet I did not consider the possibility of a cessation of hostilities before the following autumn. Much of the quaint philosophy of the French had sunk into our hearts and insensibly became a part of us--the philosophy which had its creed in the expression _C'est la guerre_. To them and to us _C'est la guerre_ had much the significance of "All in the day's work." Like them, we treated _après la guerre_ as something in the nature of "castles in Spain." So the war finished, so our part in the fighting came to an end; a page of the world's history was turned and we moved south to Verdun to prepare for our march into conquered Germany. CHAPTER XI UP THE MOSELLE AND INTO CONQUERED GERMANY