And then, something seems to be doing at last. We who are in the know have been hearing tales of plans afoot—an attack on the Chateau Thierry salient at Chatillon-sur-Marne seemed to be the plan when we first reached these parts. The indications are now that the Germans are due for another inning and we are to meet them here. Anderson has gone up with the 2nd Battalion to hold the trenches with the French. Donovan and McKenna are in support. There is a big dugout in a knoll ahead of us—they call it a hill, just as in Atlantic City any place four feet above tide water is called a height—and we are to move there when action begins. I am sitting on top of it—have been here all this sunny afternoon reading a book the Colonel gave me, Gabriel Hanotaux on France under Henri Quatre—and I certainly do not like the idea of spending my young life in a dugout P. C. during action. I am going to tell Colonel McCoy that my spiritual duties demand that I visit Anderson’s Battalion. He says that he wants his Officers to enjoy this war—the only war most of them can hope to have. And I hate dugouts anyway. To get from Harp Woods to Chapel Woods you go north for about four miles through Jonchery to St. Hilaire le Grand—a bit of a village which to borrow from Voltaire’s remark about the Holy Roman Empire does not look particularly saintly nor hilarious nor grand. The Ohios are on the right of it, and our Company E just to the west with patches of blue Frenchmen dotted all around. Follow the Ancient Roman Way for a kilometer or two and you get to a patch of woods with tops of mounds showing through them as if large sized moles had been working there. It is marked on the map as Subsector Taupinière in the Auberive sector. But we carry our names with us, and these bits of the soil of France are to be called while we inhabit them P. C. Anderson, P. C. Kelly, P. C. Prout and P. C. Finny; P.C., meaning “Post of Command.” I have spent the week with Anderson. He has his P. C. in an elephant hut—a little hole about five feet underground with a semi-circular roof of corrugated iron piled over with sand bags and earth,—enough to turn the splinters of a shell. I passed a couple of days with Captain Charles Baker of Company E, who is over to the right, along the Suippes. Charles is all energy and business, as usual. And Lieutenant Andy Ellett came in one night quite peevish because the French had countermanded the orders for a patrol. Andy likes the scent of danger. At P. C. Baker I saw Jim Murray, whom I once started out for the priesthood. I spent a pleasant day wandering about on my lawful occasions among the men in the different positions, one of which I found very popular, as just there the Suippes had actually enough water for a man to take a decent bath in. At the proper time I did not fail to discover the Company Kitchen, located on the river bank in a charming spot. While doing justice to a good meal I discussed Mt. Vernon politics with Carmody and Vahey.