There is great joy in the regiment, for Captain Hurley is back. He looks thin and none too fit, and I know he is with us, not because the hospital authorities thought that he should be, but through his own strong desire and pleading eloquence. We had a visit from Donovan also—on crutches. The Provost Marshal General had him transferred to his department while he was in the hospital, and now he is touring the country in a car, performing his new services. It is not a bad sort of a job at all—with headquarters in Paris, and a chance to tour all over France in a first-class automobile, with the best billets and the best food wherever he goes—but not for Donovan. No one of our enlisted men marooned in a casual camp with a lot of absolute strangers ever uttered with greater longing and pathos the formula, “I want to be back with my old outfit.” For Donovan’s case I shall omit the pathos. When that young man wants anything very bad he gets it. I expect to see him back on duty with us in a very, very brief time. My mail is a very full one these days. All of our old-timers back in hospitals and camps are clamoring to return to the regiment, and they think that if I only speak to somebody, a word from me will manage it. I went to Mersch to see my ever kind friend, Colonel Hughes, our Divisional Chief of Staff, to inquire if some general arrangement could not be made for the return of all men in combat divisions who had been evacuated from the line through wounds or sickness. I found that he was doing everything that he possibly could to get our Rainbow fellows back, and he promised to work for an order along the lines I proposed. The regiment marched on the 1st of December, Headquarters passing the night at Mersch; and on December 2nd to Waldbillig. December 3rd was the day on which we finally accomplished what we had started out to do—make our invasion of Germany. We crossed the border by a bridge over the Sauer river into the village of Bollendorf. Captain John Mangan, who had come to the regiment on business from the 2nd Army, George Boothby of the New York _World_ and myself crossed the bridge ahead of the others, very curious to see what reception we would get in the land of the enemy. The first indication of the sort of reception we were to have came from an invitation from an old farmer and his wife whose house stood at the end of the bridge to step inside and have a glass of schnapps; when we prudently declined this, we were offered apples, but not being there as visitors, we felt it proper to say no. The proffered kindnesses were inspired partly no doubt by a desire to propitiate, but nobody could doubt that it was largely the decent impulse of a nice old couple. We rejoined the regiment for the march across.