"Judex ergo cum sedebit Quidquid latet, apparebit Nil, inultum remanebit." CELANO. The Third Army, which was to march into Germany as the army of occupation, was all in place on the 15th of November. My regiment was bivouacked in what had once been a wood, northeast of shell-shattered Verdun. The bleakest of bleak north winds whistled over the hilltops, whirling the gray dust in clouds. The men huddled around fires or burrowed into cracks in the hillside. Here we prepared as well as we could for our move forward. Before dawn on the 17th of November, the infantry advanced in two parallel columns. By sunrise we were over the German lines and the brown columns were winding down the white, dusty roads through villages long beaten out of the semblance of human habitation by the shells. Gazing back down the column, the thought that always struck uppermost was the realization of strength. The infantry column moves slowly, but the latent power in the close mass of marching men is very impressive. The only thing I know which compares with it in suggestion of power is a line of great gray dreadnaughts lunging across the water. At one village a young French soldier, who had been riding on a bicycle by our column, stopped sadly before three crumbling walls. It was all that was left of his home. His father, the mayor of the village, had lived there. His mother had died in Germany and he did not know what had become of his father. By night we were out of the uninhabited parts and were reaching the freed French villages. Here we found starving men, women, and children whom we helped out from our none-too-plentiful rations. These people were pathetic. They seemed to have lost the power to rejoice. They looked at us from their doors with lackluster eyes and apparent indifference. One woman told me that the Germans as they left her house had told her they would be back soon. I asked her if she believed it, and she simply shrugged her shoulders. Next morning we were on the march again. All day long, past our advancing columns, streamed the prisoners whom the Germans had been working in the coal mines. They were French, Italian, Russian, and Rumanian, desperately emaciated for the most part and still wearing their old uniforms. Sometimes they dragged behind them little carts containing the possessions of two or three of them. Often I stopped them and questioned them, but whether they were French or not they seemed to have one idea, and one only--to put as many miles between them and Germany as possible. We had sent back to where our baggage was stored while we were at Verdun and brought up our colors and our band. Now we put them at the head of the column and went forward with band playing and colors flying.