A hitch in the serving of the _complete repasts_. I looked into the kitchen to see if things couldn’t be hurried up. The group that met my eyes, of the cook and her assistant wrestling with yards of blood-sausage, could have been the female pendant to the Laocoön. It was awful. As I turned back to the counter I heard this bit of conversation between two _poilus_ waiting for their meal: “_Tu sais_, when a Canadian sees wood he goes wild. He’ll chop up anything from a roadside cross to a baby-carriage. They say it is because of his forests. At —— last spring they took the balusters out of the house where they were quartered, and that pretty Jeanne you’ve heard about—_un amour, je te dis_—fell down in the dark and was killed.” “Each one has his _manie_,” answered his friend, in perfect tolerance. “_Mais moi, je ne toucherais pas à une croix._” And he proceeded to cross himself at the bare thought. A colonel whose name I don’t remember took me into the garden to see the kiosks that I had so often indicated when the men asked for _pinard_ or _tabac_. The _guignol_ that I had seen at the camouflage grounds in July was in place; beyond was the huge bomb-proof shelter built by German prisoners to contain 2,000 men in case of _avion_ attack. We took a few steps into its black, moist intricacies. As I came up I found myself close to a group of some thirty German prisoners being marched past to work on a cement emplacement for a gun, the large P.G.[24] stamped on their backs, and wearing their small round caps with the red stripe, and any kind of clothes. I felt for a moment like an illustration for Cæsar’s _Commentaries_, or some sort of a Roman watching northern prisoners being marched by. The officer who showed me about was one of the twenty-seven men who escaped from the Fort de Vaux, and had lost his only child on Hill 304. “I was wounded, and I’m not yet worth much, which is why I am here. My boy was only twenty-one—_mais c’était une personne faite_—a leader of men. All, with those qualities, go; I am not alone, alas! in my _douleur_.” And that is one of the beautiful things of this sorrowful epoch. Each thinks upon the others’ grief.... And then I left it all. The jade-colored Marne is flat, eddyless, brimming over with its autumn rains, the reeds have disappeared, the trunks of the willows are hidden. Over the gray bridge flows, unabated, that other stream of war and life. _Camions_, ambulances, smart red-and-white-marked staff automobiles, soldiers in every conceivable state of soul and body, “enduring their going hence even as their coming hither.” English, Americans, Senegalese, Annamites—a dozen races swell this Gallic flood, and the Gray Sisters never so busy since the world began. PARIS, _January 7th, 1918_.