If ever I return to Charleville and want to go to the Hotel de Commerce, it will be impossible without a guide. I remember going the length of a long street of shady trees, crossing a wide square, and then turning off into a narrow alley where ancient lanterns, well masked, hung over from grilled wall brackets. I remember flashing my electric pocket lamp down on the cobbled street, for just an instant, when Herrmann dropped his gloves. We stumbled down a blind alley that called to mind the habitation of François Villon in "The Lodging for a Night." Then Herrmann was rattling the knocker on the huge oaken doors of a two story flat-roofed house that looked a century old. The door groaned back and I found myself gazing into the blinking eyes of an old portier who held a candle and who would have demanded what we wanted had he not suddenly spied the military gray of Herrmann's cape and at once asked us to come in. The few hours I slept that night were in a venerable, four-posted bed, in a low-ceilinged, high-casemented room such as you sometimes see on the stage in a romantic play. I remember hearing a rapping on the door, almost as soon, it seemed, as I had closed my eyes. Five o'clock! And I heard the portier shuffling down the hall and then the hollow, rapping sound of another early morning call on the Ober-Lieutenant's door. Below in the alley panted one of the gray-green army motors waiting to bring us to the station. Cold sprouts, coffee, and a roll, and we had climbed into a compartment of the train for Lille. From now on, soldiers with fixed bayonets composed the train crew. We crossed a wooden trestle built by German pioneers high above a green swirl of water between pretty trees, and on the left we saw the ruins of a stone bridge dynamited by the French. We rushed out at St. Vincennes to eat at an officers' mess, and as the train moved on I saw at a siding a long line of cars, their sides and roofs marked with the Red Cross; and even as we passed I saw two stretchers being borne along the track and lifted with their wounded through the open windows of one of the cars. I saw a white bandaged leg as the stretcher tilted and then the attendants inside the car covered it from sight. Hourly the front drew nearer. Trenches appeared. The train suddenly slid into a station and stopped. We were in Lille. While two soldiers were loading the luggage, photograph apparatus and all, upon a small truck, Herrmann suddenly plucked my arm. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing up at the huge glass-domed roof. I saw there a big hole, edged with splintered glass, and a fragment of blue sky beyond. "That's the hole made by a French aeroplane bomb. The Staff told me to look for it when we came to Lille. The bomb never exploded and was picked up on the tracks over there."