Neither Miss Nott nor Miss Mitchell is there, so I depart again, going over the great Marne bridge to the station. Though I can see nothing, I hear the regular practised tread of a marching squad, and when I flash my lamp to find the curb, a little detachment looms up unmeasurably big and distorted, and the horizon blue becomes that ghostly gray. In the canteen a thousand men at least. Am quite dazzled by the splendor of the installation. Warm welcome from Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell, with the light of a very understandable pride in their eyes. Go behind the long counter, then through the kitchen to the little dressing-room; take off my hat, put on a long apron, twist my pale-blue chiffon scarf about my head and am ready. As I look out over the big room I feel that in the whole world it is the only place to be. Around me surged those blue waves; the light caught helmets and drinking-cups; there was the mist of breath and smoke; the familiar sound of laughing, disputing, humming. That strange atmosphere of fatality hung over each and every one, yet with a merciless confusing of destinies in the extreme anonymity of it all. Came away at 11.30 enveloped in a strange sidereal light, the stars still more splendid as the night deepened. Even the memory of tropical constellations vaulting high altitudes was dimmed. The Great Bear lay over the left of the Marne bridge, and on the other horizon, over the Promenade du Jard, where I suddenly remembered that St.-Bernard had preached the crusade in presence of Pope Eugene and Charles VII, was Orion, so bright that he alone could have lighted the town of the Catalaunian fields, and Jupiter seemed like a distant sun, under the soft blur of the Pleiades. The river was mysterious, yet personal with its new mantle of history wrapping it sadly, yet tenderly, and with much glory. Then I was again in the still, dark, long street; no passers-by, no lights from any window, the clock of St.-Alpin striking midnight, and Orion concealed to his belt by the houses of the Place de la République. There was some deep stirring of my heart as I turned in at the door of La Haute Mère Dieu, leaving the gorgeous heavens to stretch over the wide plain of Châlons, where the hosts of Attila were defeated, where the great, misty, tragic, glorious history of Champagne and Lorraine rolls itself out. Now above it all is the whir of _aeros de chasse_, and a faint, very faint booming of cannon. The Châlons plain continues to give me the “creeps.” It is haunting and suggestive in the same way that the Roman Campagna is haunting and suggestive, though the great bare stretch, with its bald, chalky scarrings, its dull spots of pine woods, its dust or mud, has none of the material beauty of the Campagna. Doubtless I’m within the folds of the mantle of the concentrated, continuous human passions that cover it.