Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our charming chauffeuse dead tired after the long day, but steering us so prudently and yet so quickly through the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman chauffeur _any day_!—not simply when coming from the front! She takes no chances, but she makes good time and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves one’s heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to the hotel door, “It’s not so good, after all, to feel _just safe_ and to be comfortable.” PART III LORRAINE IN AUTUMN “_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_” CHAPTER I NANCY AND MOLITOR _1.30 p.m., Tuesday, October 9th._ Passing Meaux. Square gray tower of its cathedral against a gray sky, the gray hemicycle of its lovely apse cutting in against reddish-gray roofs; gray houses with old towers built into them; yellowing acacia and plane and willow trees; level corn-fields stripped of their harvest, pheasants and magpies pecking in them; golden pumpkins; and _betteraves_ showing red and vermilion roots bursting out of the ground; everything wet—wet. LIGNY-EN-BARROIS. Two American soldiers walking up a muddy village street in the dusk; rain falling; a cinnamon-colored stream slipping by; and a quantity of shabby, wet foliage and wetter meadows. GONDRECOURT, _5.40_. In the extreme point of the angle where the Nancy train seems to turn back to Paris and where many American soldiers are billeted. Cheerless, dimly lighted station. Groups of our men standing about, high piles of United States boxes, marked “Wizard Oats.” Some persuasion of black-frock-coated “sky pilot” walking up and down and humming, “Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore” (there _was_ a lot of water about!), and then in the darkness the train slipped out. There and in all the dim, wet Lorraine villages about are damp, puzzled, homesick, forlorn, brave, determined, eager young Americans. HÔTEL EXCELSIOR ET D’ANGLETERRE, NANCY, _Tuesday evening_. Cabs at station, hot water, writing-paper, meat, warmth, all sorts of things you don’t always get on Tuesday in Paris. Everything, in fact, except light. Dining-room full of officers. _Chic atmosphère de guerre_ began to envelope me, not yet experienced that day. Started from Paris tired and not particularly receptive, but was conscious of a slow quickening of sensibility as the hours passed, drawing me within the zone of armies. This “chic war atmosphere” is like nothing else. Impersonal and larger lungs are needed to breathe it. We no longer, so many of us, read of their battles, but they still fight them, these blue-clad men out here. In the coal-black evening, stumbling from the station, one realizes it all once more—and there is some lighting of the soul.