Then one finds oneself in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville, where one doesn’t think of the Middle Ages, for in it is a figure of a weeping woman, and on the statue’s base are inscribed the names of young men fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without reason. At the station. _L’abri de bombardement pour permissionnaires_ is in an old convent having a deep cellar, across the railway. We carry our own luggage, resembling almost any _poilu_, and with grateful hearts think of what we left behind. Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no room in the train. The famous and now classic refrain, “_Faut pas s’en paire_,”[19] floats about and makes one think how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to virtues, the French seem to have all those we thought they had, in addition to others we never suspected them of having. A man completely bent with grief follows two men carrying a coffin. He himself carries a huge bead wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his sorrow, it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, which I thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals that which it receives. Dombasle, with its busy station and its great munitions-factories. Columns of smoke, from purest white to darkest brown, were rising to the shining heavens, and women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were going to work in the factories. At Rosières immense camouflage works, and then the railway skirts the great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, very young girl is drawing a huge canal-boat. Her arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the broad band by which she tows that behemoth, a thousand times her size. In accord with some law of matter it is just possible. One thinks of the building of the Pyramids, and of the unborn. NANCY, _1.15_. Lunching at the Café Stanislas and eating my fifth macaroon, “for remembrance.” The gold guipure of the wrought-iron work makes the square seem to me like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a challenge to memory. And I will _not_ forget. _Later._ At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An old man attended to our luggage; he liked his tip and became talkative as he straightened our impedimenta in the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Verdun, the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames this summer. His toothless old mouth trembled, and I thought to myself in sudden horror, “God, is _this_ France?” LIVERDUN, _3 o’clock_.