We dashed out; a crowd was already gathering. A young French aviator with a curious look in his eyes was watching it being set up. Having espied the wings on his uniform, we asked “what and where and how” and are “they” dead or prisoners? Some one said, “_C’est lui_,” indicating the young man, who did not answer our questions, but continued to stand quite still in some sort of dream or _détente_ of nerves. But a man in the crowd said: “He brought it down at Pont-à-Mousson, and _they_ are prisoners.” We were standing by the statue of _Stanislas le Bienfaisant, Stanislas le Bon_, his reign _le règne des talents, des arts et des vertus_ (these last not as we know them in 1917), and he _was_ looking on strange things! We went back to the café, consumed in haste and distraction the very nice little dinner, topped off by strawberries and cream and the celebrated _macarons des Sœurs Macarons_, and again I found myself dashing to the station, which one thinks is near and isn’t, accompanied by my two fair friends, all going at the same _allure militaire_ that I had taken forty-eight hours before with the two Breton officers and the Chaplain of the 52d. Wild dash at the station for our hand-luggage; and stampings of safe-conduct, then a hunt for the porter, who, with an excess of zeal (and hope), had reserved a coupé for us and put up the fateful words _dames seules_. Now there is no such thing as _dames seules_ at the front. Many officers were standing in the corridor, one on crutches, so we tore the forbidding words from the windows, and the compartment automatically, though courteously, filled. Among them two immense, dark-bearded men from the Midi, with accents to defeat the enemy, and a pale officer from near the Swiss frontier, as we afterward discovered. He smiled when I said to the dark one sitting by me, after the greetings and thanks: “You come from Marseilles?” (He came from a little place five miles from there.) The officer on crutches stretched his leg with a contraction of the face and a sigh of relief. They were all _en route_ for home, from the same regiment, the seven precious days of _permission_ counting from the hour they reach their homes till the hour they leave them, after months in the field. They had fought in Belgium, on the dunes, these men of the south, those first eighteen months, up to their waists in water, often for weeks at a time. They found the Lorraine landscape that so soothed my soul only fairly pretty, and spoke soft praises of _le Midi_. They all had the strange, bold, hard, shining look about the eyes, with a deeper suggestion of sadness, that men just returning from action have. It is the warrior look—one kills or one is killed, one conquers or is conquered; there is no _via media_.