Shortly after, a handsome young officer came in, a gentleman, and speaking beautiful English. It wasn’t “he,” however, but a friend of his, and we did a little “society” talk—the weather, the necessity of learning the languages young, the theater, that Réjane was getting old, and “_L’Elévation_” was bad for the morals, and fashions, if the skirts _could_ get shorter—but nothing of the war. At two o’clock another military auto was announced, which the general had sent with a doctor to take us to Mont Frenet, four kilometers from Suippes and six from the German lines. The young officer departed; we veiled and gloved ourselves and descended, and got into the motor, where we found a large, dark, military man inclining to _embonpoint_, who thought he was good-looking, and started out. The first thing we met as we got out of town on the dusty, blazing highroad was a little funeral cortége, preceded by a priest. The body of the soldier was draped in the tricolor, and following to his last rest, close behind, was his _camarade_, with head bared. He had doubtless expired in the big hospital near by, one of those lonely hospital deaths that hundreds of thousands have suffered before transfiguration. We were in the great plain of the Champagne Pouilleuse that leads to Suippes, Sainte-Ménehould, and stretches out to Reims—a plain with great, white, chalky scars of quarries, interspersed with fields and dark patches of pine woods. I asked the doctor about the site of the ancient camp of Attila and the battle of the Catalonian fields, but his knowledge of the matter was vague and his interest perfunctory. I thought afterward he might have had a more personal afternoon planned than that of taking two objective-minded ladies to Mont Frenet. There was once a great Roman road from Bar-le-Duc to Reims, and all about are little churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly touched up in the eighteenth. After three-quarters of an hour we found ourselves nearing what might have been a modern mining settlement. It is the great front hospital of Mont Frenet. A model establishment organized and conducted by a man of heart and brain, Doctor Poutrain. Young, _élancé_, alert, he took us the rounds of his little world, from the door where the ambulances deposit their wounded, their dying, and oft their dead, where they are sorted out, through the numberless wards, even to the model wash-houses and the places where the garments of those brought in are scientifically separated from their inevitable and deadly live stock. As we passed through one of the wards, I saw the doctor’s eye change, and, following it, I perceived, as he quickly went to the bedside, a face with the death look already on it; and in a moment, with a slight sigh, a soul had breathed itself out—_en route_ to the heaven of those who die _pro patria_.