General Goïgoux presented us to General Gouraud standing by his motor with several other generals, while a squad of German prisoners, looking out of the corners of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more conscious of that harmony of browns and straight lines, that something remote yet majestic in his being. As we turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave, and he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man’s shoulder. _Oh, enfants de la patrie!_ _Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m._ All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of the _sirènes_ over the plain of Châlons, and it seemed to me like cries of men of the Stone Age. These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of beings of the twilight ages; elusive emanations, dim suggestions of their psychologies have at moments possessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains. Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired—too tired to care whether “they” got here or not—and stayed in bed during the _alertes_, but I thought of airmen, attackers and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a golden half-moon lighting a dim heaven. Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the ways of peace. At 4.30 I heard Joseph’s gas-bark and knew he was again with us, stretched out on the _chaise-longue_ under the chestnut-tree. As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting about the stars of the gorgeous night that was so soon to give way to another summer day, and I suddenly saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere going forth at some word of command to their doom. There was a flinging back of my thoughts upon me, and I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill of early dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see nothing for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for what it is—the abode of mad horrors. _Later._ Paid my respects to General Goïgoux for an instant of time (I can always get out quickly) in the old gray house of the Rue Grande Étape, and found him as always, _distingué_, human, untired, cordial. Officers passing in and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with maps. Later Colonel Rolland of the 1st Zouaves, very jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men and adored by them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad station, to inspect the great, dreary sheds that with time, labor, and much energy are to become _La Cantine Américaine_. Blue-clad men were lying around like logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to step over legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. A dreadful sound of hammering was echoing through the vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb the slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby in comparison to the first-line trenches.