_October 10th._ Nancy in rain and storm, and all night the sound of cannon and gun and mitrailleuse turned against sweet flesh and blood, the sons of women dying in agony hard as their mother’s pain, and no way out. Never were the imaginations of men less elastic; little groups everywhere are hourly setting this cold grind in motion with a word or a gesture, around green tables or bending over maps—in a few small spaces deciding the agonies of millions. An _avion_ almost tapped at my window once toward morning and reminded me of a young aviator with whom we talked in the train last night, his face a-twitch, strange eyes, gloomy, set mouth, once _jeunesse dorée_. A hard look as he answered: “_Avion de chasse, il n’y a que cela._” He had been “resting” in the cavalry, where there was little movement, and he couldn’t stand it. As for the trenches— “_O les tranchées! Être avec des gens que je ne connais pas, sous des conditions indescriptibles; non, je n’en peux plus._” “Better to fall from the heavens?” I asked him. And then I realized the disarray of nerves, the complete unfitting of the being to an earthly habitat, in the knowledge that life is measured by an almost countable number of hours or days, scarcely weeks, and rarely, rarely months, and the calling on help from the flower of sleep to fit one for acts impossible to normal being. I must say this very evidently “made-in-Germany” hotel is most comfortable. _Jugend-Stil_ designed bed, exquisitely clean; great white eiderdown; a munificence of brass electric-light fixtures representing leaves, with frosted shades running from pale pink to pale green, and giving plenty of light; the iron shutters tightly pulled down, of course. Large wash-stand with a huge faucet for hot water, bearing the name “Jacob”; the heating apparatus by Rückstuhl; the telephone, “Berliner-system”; electric light and lift the familiar “Schindler.” Wardrobe and mirror over wash-stand have, like the bed, a design, not of conventionalized flowers, but of flowers devoid of life. The inexpressibly sloppy _mollesse_ of _art nouveau_ is in such contrast to the beautiful precision of touch of the eighteenth century. At 9.30 E. M. came into my room and said, “We’d better doll up and be off.” I leave it to the gentlest of readers to surmise what we did before being off, and I would like to say here that one doesn’t always “doll up” for others; the process gives to one’s own being a sense of completeness most sustaining. It comes after that of having one’s clothes put on properly.