The opening of what seems to be an old kitchen door. A warning to keep your head down, and we go stooping into a room dug in the ground, at the other end of which a genial, gray-haired man, whom you instantly decide is Colonel Meyer of the Seventeenth Infantry, is rising from beside a homemade table spread with military maps, a hospitable smile on his ruddy face. "Welcome," he is saying in German. "So you got up the road all right?" A sudden suspicion possesses me, and after introductions are over, I ask: "Colonel, there were too many bullets on that road. Where did they come from? Wild?" "Wild?" he chuckled. "Why, sir, that road is our line of communication. It is watched and is covered by French sharpshooters. We lose half a dozen men on it every day." And the officers at Brigade Headquarters smiled. * * * * * 5:57 P. M. The broad wooden benches against the walls seem to us as comfortable as a cushioned lounge, and repeating, with many a "_glaube mir_"--which the Colonel and his Adjutant are quick to catch on to as the "believe me" of American slang--that wild horses couldn't drag us out on that road again, we take in the details of the room. It is about ten feet from where I sit to the strip of burlap covering the earthen wall behind the opposite bench. I should say that from the shelf, where the Colonel has his personal belongings, down to the other end of the room, which the glow from our big oil table lamp only lights faintly, is about twenty-five feet, enough for men to sleep on the benches along either wall. In the middle squats a red bellied stove, its pipe going up through the roof. The door looks as if it came from a farmhouse kitchen; it is paneled with four little squares of glass, one of them cracked, probably from the concussion of a bursting shell. Yes, the timbers overhead look strong, intensely safe unless a _grenat_ should burst squarely on top of them. And only by one chance in a thousand could a shrapnel ball fly down through the door. Yes, it seems safe in here; slowly we began to forget about the road. The Colonel excuses himself to study a map that seems to have been done by a stencil, and I cannot help but notice that it has been executed to the most minute detail, even individual trees and bushes being marked. I wonder what the scale is. I have to compel myself to glance elsewhere, for the fascination of the map is strong.