Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy in my mind, blurred with fatigue, in a compartment with five silent, dead-tired officers. It’s a great human document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o’clock till six I watched the _poilus_ fill the _Foyer des Alliés_, in and out, in and out. From time to time the voice of the station-master called out some fateful destination. I was thankful for any momentary slackening of the rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouillon one can also give a word, the precious word, where all is so anonymous. Between three and four there was a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed, scraggy-mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, said to me, “I am father of five,” and, showing his blue trousers tucked in his boots, added, “I am of the attacking troops.” He then shifted his accoutrement and dug out from his person the photographs of the five children and his _épouse_, and I think more and more, “it is for the young to fight.” I can’t bear the look on the faces of the middle-aged going up to battle. The _poilu_ trying to find his purse or the photographs of his family, among everything else in the world that he carries on his person, pressed tightly against other men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a sardine trying to turn over would feel! The next with whom I spoke was a _gaillard_ with a glancing blue eye, reddish mustache and high color, from Barcelona, of French parents, and he insisted on speaking Spanish with me. His brother is professor at Saint-Nazaire. “Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George instead of about the family.” This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English nationality. “Do you think we are going to win, señorita?” “Of course,” I answer, “with the help of God. _Dios y victoria_,” I add, piously. But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, “_Victoria y Dios_,” and then gives way to a comrade who was at Craonne in April. He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth and was probably naturally flesh-loving, and wanted his coffee very hot, and looked approvingly at me as I said: “_Mon ami_, I know all about it, if coffee isn’t _too_ hot, it isn’t hot enough.” He ended a conversation about an engagement he had been in by saying: “The most awful sensation is to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses and to know that you have got to walk into it and to see the men ahead of you stepping with strange steps—and some falling.” As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain-fearing, yet that is the way _his_ dust may be called on to return to dust. There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, but nobody ever jokes about a bullet. It’s a thing with a single purpose—and you may be it.