I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of supreme personal distinction entered the little sandy-floored café, a gentleman who should always be arriving in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or receiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting in a library of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous bindings. It was M. de S., and we shortly all got into the big auto, we three women on the broad back seat, M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even the bend of his long back was _l’élégance suprême_. He said the motor had seen three years of war-service, but certainly there was something unfatigued about it as it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, on the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on the first Verdun sign-post gave a feeling of having shot itself into one’s heart, as well as pointing the way. Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing men back from the front, ourselves and everything else enveloped in a white plaster-of-Paris-like cloud of dust. It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and brown. In some of them the men were singing the _chansons de route_ that soldiers so love, and many of them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. The grass and flowers of the wayside were as if dipped in whitewash, but the road, like all the roads of France—those veins of her body of death _and_ life—was in excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red Cross convoys, and all the time we were swinging through ruined villages. At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his bayonet. Our papers being in _archi_ condition, we passed through the little village of the _Quartier-Général_ without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie there is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women holding up a _motif_ of flowers in a basket; near by there is an old hostelry, _Le Raisin Blanc_, in front of which soldiers were sitting, drinking their _bocks_ and reading newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, we pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition parks, looking for all the world like mining camps in Western towns at home.