Extreme heat. Train four hours late on account of the movement of troops. Wave after wave of horizon blue undulates through the station. They are lying about, standing about, sitting about—the _poilus_. Half hidden by their equipment, their countless bundles tied around their waists, slung on their shoulders, under their arms, they seem indescribably weary and dusty, turned toward the blazing front where the best they can hope is _la bonne blessure_—theirs not to reason why. Sometimes 30,000 pass through Châlons in a day. Now it comes to me that our men—our fresh, eager, beautiful young men, such as I saw disembark at Vera Cruz—will pass through this same station to that same blazing front.... By my window, on the siding, is passing an endless train of box-cars, with four horses in the ends of each car. Between the horses’ forefeet, pale-blue groups of men are crowded; no room to lie, scarcely to sit—cramped, hot, with their eternal accoutrement. One bent group was playing cards, the horses’ heads above them. But mostly they are looking out at people who are not called upon to die. _Later._ Pangs of hunger began to assail me as the train pulled out. I went into the dining-car and had a modest, belated repast of _œufs sur le plat_, cheese and fruit. At the tables were groups of uniformed men talking in low voices of what had been and what might have been. As I looked out of the window, while waiting, my eyes fell upon the first band of prisoners I had seen—tall, stalwart men, wearing the round white cap with its band of red—at work on the roads, those veins and arteries of France. An officer, once the most civilian of civilians, looking like the pictures of Alexandre Dumas _fils_ on the covers of cheap editions of _La Dame aux Camélias_, with bushy hair parted on one side, mustache, and stubby Napoleon, broad face and twinkling eyes, pointed out Sermaize, the first of the devastated villages we passed, which has been rebuilt by the English Society of Friends. “Conscientious objectors” don’t intend to let the sons of Mars do everything, but they can’t keep pace with the destruction. In _Le Village Reconstitué_ M. Reinach speaks of the ugliness of the models proposed to the victims, which pass understanding, and says that even the vocabulary of Huysmans would not suffice to give the least idea of them. What the peasant wants is “_mon village_,” which doesn’t at all resemble what the _commis voyageur en laideur_ proposes. REVIGNY, _4.30 p.m._