Farther along much thinning out of the woods, the beautiful warmth-giving, shade-giving forests of France. In one place there is a planting of young, slender trees, and I thought on those other children of France who must grow to manhood, remake her soul, transmit her immortality. The first harvest is stacked and yellow, and nature is densely, deeply green where it had been pale and expectant. Even the Marne, which we caught up here, has a deeper color than in June, as it reflects the lush green. Meaux, with its cathedral rising from the center of the town, untouched except by time. Meaux has now come to be a sort of joke (“_de deux maux choisir le moindre_”) which few can resist—I’ve even heard it at the Théâtre Français—and it’s supposed to be the heart’s desire of the _embusqué_, far enough from the front not to get hurt, and far enough from Paris to be out of sight. Château Thierry, with its first vintage of white grapes, and I bethought me how the whole of France is one vast wine-press—“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Epernay, with its peculiar church tower. The great building of the champagne Mercier firm near the station has every window-pane broken, and part of it is serving as a Red Cross station. The wave of invasion pressed hard through Epernay that August of 1914. In the dining-car we sat at a table with two officers—an airman, tall, deep-eyed, some sort of _tic nerveux_ disturbing his face, with the _Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ among other decorations; and a captain of infantry, who had been months at Arras, and at Verdun the terrible March of 1916. About the time that the cross-eyed waiter (it was easy, poor soul, to see why he wasn’t wanted in the trenches) threw the last set of plates with a deafening crash down the line of diners (the captain of infantry said it was just like the first-line trenches), the airman, whose nerves couldn’t stand it, pursued, rather irritably: “You don’t even read the _communiqués_ any more, I wager. _Oh, les civils!_” “I can’t truthfully say I do, always,” I answered, feeling called on to defend the _sacrés civils_. “After three years of it we are fatigued and bewildered by the spectacularness of it, the great, dazzling, hideous mass of it, and you who perish on the battle-field but perform an act that all must some day perform, only different in that it is far better done—_dulce et decorum_—but, after all, the same act that we must perform against our will, at the mercy of some accidental combination. It’s the same outcome, ‘and one’s a long time dead.’” After a pause and a deep look, perhaps it is the look men have when alone in the secular spaces, he answered: “_Choisir et aimer sa mort, c’est un peu comme choisir sa bien-aimée_,” and suddenly a flash illuminated my soul, showing me something of the _dulce_ as well as the _decorum_ of dying for country.