I began an innocent despatch that seemed hardly worth the cable tolls. It ambled along, with cumbrous sentences and involved grammar, describing American war charities. Then without what in cable parlance is known as a "full stop," which indicates a complete break in the sense of the reading matter, I inserted the words "refugees crowding gare du nord to-night from points south of Lille," and continued the despatch with more material of the sort with which it began. I went home hoping for the best and wondering if I had made myself sufficiently clear to arouse the suspicion of the copy reader on the other side of the ocean who handled my copy. If I had I knew that those eleven words would be printed in the largest display type the following morning. Two weeks later, when the next batch of newspapers reached Paris, I read those words with interest. They were all there, but carefully buried in the story of war charities exactly where I had placed them. CHAPTER VII THE FIELD OF GLORY The battle of the Marne was fought by the Allies in the direct interest of the city of Paris. The result was the city's salvation. At the time, only a small percentage of the inhabitants knew anything about it. But as all the world knows now, the battlefield of the Marne was the first field of glory for the Allied armies in the great European war. When the war is over, the sight-seeing motors will reach it in two hours, probably starting from the corner of the Avenue de l'Opera and the Rue de la Paix--a street that by now might have a different name had it not been for the thousands who died only a few miles away. On one of the first days of September, 1914, the few journalists who remained in Paris gathered at the Café Napolitain early in the afternoon, instead of at the _apéritif_ hour. The Café Napolitain, around the corner from the sight-seeing motor stand, is the rendezvous for journalists, and always has been. At the _apéritif_ hour--just before dinner--you may see all the best-known figures in the French journalistic world, also the correspondents of the London and New York press, seated on its sidewalk _terrasse_.