About this time a touch of war and Hun Hellishness was brought home to us. William S. McNair, Colonel of the 6th Field Artillery was promoted in France and ordered to America to command our Brigade. Accordingly he left France on the U. S. S. “Antilles”. At about 6.45 in the morning of October 17th a German submarine succeeded in torpedoing his boat. She sank immediately with the loss of about 65 lives. The General was in the water for some three quarters of an hour, when he was taken into a life boat. Six hours later one of the convoy, the Morgan yacht “Corsair” returned from trying to find the submarine and took aboard all the survivors. They returned to France and two weeks later the General again sailed for home on the transport “Tenadores”. The “Tenadores” has since been sunk by a mine, but happily for the Brigade it was not on this voyage. Christmas came and with it the joy of home for a few, but the majority of the men must stay in camp. It was all part of the great task we had undertaken. We accepted it as such. Transportation was not available to move our now vast army to its homes. We made merry, or rather, we did better than that; we pretended to make merry. We sang the songs we had rehearsed for the occasion. It was a holiday. There were no drills. We had time to think. We can be honest now. Our thoughts were not those of the schoolboy on his holiday with his plans for stockings and Christmas tree, dinner and stomach ache. They were far-away thoughts of things, once commonplace and taken for granted, now suddenly and forever dearer than life itself; things which in fact made life worth while. Home, loved, of course, but so much a part of us that we had grown to accept it as a matter of right. But strangely enough our thoughts carried us farther. We found that we were longing for the little individual problems of our daily routine in the past,--problems that had once perplexed and annoyed us we now craved as a hungry man craves food.