It was summer during the Château-Thierry fighting; a kindly summer, resembling our June in the northern, or our April in the southern States. The enthusiasm of our first important action gave hardships a certain glamour. Men could sleep on the ground without blankets; the wounded did not suffer greatly from cold, if they remained out over night. Cold rations were tolerable. Clothes and earth dried soon after a rain. Fox-holes did not become wells on the levels, and cisterns on the slopes. Guns and trucks did not cut deep ruts beside the roads or in crossing the fields. Summer was ever the time for war in temperate climates; winter the time of rest. It was so in our Civil War. The battlefield was a sombre brown, splashed by liquid grays. No bright colors varied the monotony of the landscape except the hot flashes from gun-mouths; there were none overhead against the leaden and weeping sky except the red and blue of the bull's-eye of an aeroplane, and the gossamer sheen of its wings. Khaki uniforms and equipment, and the tint of trucks, automobiles, caissons, and ambulances were all in the protective coloration of the surrounding mud. A horse with a dappled coat, or with dark bay or black coat, shining in the mist, was a relief. The sounds were the grating of marching hobnailed shoes, the rumble of motor-trucks and other transport, the roar of the guns, the strident gas alarm, the bursts of shells, the staccato of machine-guns: all in an orchestrated efficiency which wasted not even noise in conserving all energy to the end of destruction--if we except the song of marching companies at the rear, and the badinage with which men diverted one another and themselves from their real thoughts. There were the one-way roads where all the traffic was going in one direction, either to or from the front, all day and all night in orderly procession. Along the roads our negro laborers, who all seemed to be giants, kept filling in stones and shoveling in earth to mend broken places. They were in a marvelous world, whose diversions tempted a holiday spirit. They rested on their spades as they watched a general's car, or a big gun, or a tank, or one of a dozen other wonders on wheels pass by; or, the whites of their eyes showing, looked around at the sound of the burst of a shell or an aviator's bomb; or aloft at the balloons and passing aeroplanes and duels in the air. "How do you like this weather?" I asked one. "It's ve'y penetratin' and ve'y cold, seh," he replied. "They say it keeps on getting colder and colder, and penetratin'er and penetratin'er, and spring nevah comes." "It will not, if you don't work hard and win the war." "I'm goin' to work ve'y hard. We've gotta win this war, seh; or we'll all freeze to death--only it's pow'ful hard keeping yo' mind on work, seh, when so much is goin' on."