I trod as lightly as I could through a resounding corridor, having a profound regard for all sleeping things, past many leather leggings and spurred boots outside of silent doors. When I left the canteen, the guard, in answer to my cry, “Sentinelle!” said, as he opened the gate, “_Ce n’est pas comme à Verdun, où l’on ne passe pas_”; and then, “_Bonsoir, Mees._” It was so easily and gracefully said in the inimitable French way. _October 17th, 7.30 a.m._ Tea, a lukewarm pale-gray beverage, with some still crisp leaves afloat on the top. I would have been ungrateful if I had not thought of the Hôtel des Vosges. Mrs. Church, fresh and strong as the morning, though just back from night shift, boiled some water for me and I blessed her. The bleakness of this room is indescribable. Two lithographs of the “_Angelus_” and “_Les Glaneurs_” but add to the desolation. A red-and-yellow striped paper on the walls; on the floor a worn square of Brussels carpet; brown woolen curtains; shutters with slats askew; a large mahogany chest of drawers; a grayish dimity cover to the feather bed, with machine-stitched _motifs_ showing its ugly yellow case underneath; linen sheets, large, thick, and clean—and you have almost any room of La Haute Mère Dieu. Except Mrs. C.’s with its extraordinary bed, painted cream-color, having large “Empirish” corners formed by pale green and gilt Egyptian unduly voluptuous Sphinx-like figures, and a brownish-red plush baldaquin from which depend some yellowish-brown curtains; the brown carpet with purplish flowers is a protest between the two, and the rest of the room a riot of gilt mirrors. It’s a room one couldn’t forget, and why provincial hotels cling so to brown upholstery I don’t know. They give the effect of being old and dirty even when they are—_perhaps_—new. The corridor has been a sounding-board since dawn, and all during the night _camions_ were being driven over the cobblestones, and motor horns rent the darkness. My room looks out over an old garden. A tall, dead tree-trunk has immemorial ivy clinging to it, and there is an old round well, half covered, and beyond the gate, with ivy and moss-grown urns, is a street that would have been quiet except for the _camions_; and I can see a row of distinguished-looking, plain-façaded gray houses of another century, opposite. The German General Staff was lodged here before the battle of the Marne, the chambermaid told me, with a reminiscential gleam in her eyes.