The 2nd and 3rd Battalions are not in such an antique setting, but in two villages along the bare hillsides to the south of us. It is a good walk to get to them; but I have my reward. When I get to the 2nd Battalion, if the men are busy, I drop in on Phil Gargan for a cup of coffee. I am always reminded of my visits to Ireland by the hospitality I encounter—so warm and generous and bustling and overwhelming. I get my coffee, too much of it, and too sweet, and hot beyond human endurance, and food enough offered with it to feed a platoon. And I am warm with a glow that no steaming drink could ever produce of itself. It is the same wherever I go. For instance if my steps lead me to the 3rd Battalion Pat Boland spices his coffee with native wit; or if my taste inclines me to tea I look up Pat Rogan who could dig up a cup of tea in the middle of a polar expedition. While I am on the question of eating—always an interesting topic to a soldier—let me say a word for French inns. I came to Grand with Regimental Sergeant Major Steinert, ahead of the Regiment in charge of a billetting detail, and thus made the acquaintance of the establishment of Madame Gerard at the Sign of the Golden Boar. I have seen a M. Gerard but, as in all well regulated families, he is a person with no claim to figure in a story. I am in love for the first time, and with Madame Gerard. Capable and human and merry, used to men and their queer irrational unfeminine ways, and quite able to handle them, hundreds at a time. A joke, a reprimand, and ever and always the final argument of a good meal—easy as easy. She reigns in her big kitchen, with its fireplace where the wood is carefully managed but still gives heat enough to put life and savor into the hanging pots and the sizzling turnspits. Odors of Araby the blest! And she serves her meals with the air of a beneficent old Grande Dame of the age when hospitality was a test of greatness. Private or General—it makes no difference to her. The same food and the same price and the same frank motherly humor—and they all respond with feelings that are common to all. I sit before the kitchen fire while she is at work, and talk about the war and religion and our poor soldiers so far from their mothers, and the cost of food and the fun you can get out of life, and when I get back to my cold room I go to bed thinking of how much I have learned, and that I can see at last how France has been able to stand this war for three and a half years.