And the towns we pass through are fascinating. For one thing, they come upon you suddenly. American towns absorb you gradually. First an outlying suburb, with maybe the terminus of the street-car system. Then an untidy No Man’s Land, neither cultivated nor inhabited—mainly vacant building lots—decorated along the route with huge advertisements, chiefly of automobile accessories. Here and there you pass a gasoline station or roadhouse. After that, by degrees, trim white wooden houses, with shady piazzas; increasing traffic; and finally, fifteen-storey office-buildings, shops, hotels, and the roar of the town. But in Central France these premonitory symptoms are lacking. Your company tramps along the winding road beside the river, through country cultivated to its last yard—a country of hedges and ditches and enclosed fields. A bend in the stream, and lo! before you rises a venerable city, piled up on the ground rising from the river, with ancient bridges spanning the stream and a grey cathedral crowning the whole. There are no suburbs, no advertising boards, no gasoline stations. The sea of green turf continues to the edge of the city, and very often laps against ramparts a thousand years old. You march in under the resounding arch of an ancient gateway. The streets are narrow; the gradient is frequently such as to discommode any one save a native of Lynchburg, Virginia. The shops are small, and the proprietors thereof appear to transact most of their business upon the doorstep. The inhabitants are friendly, especially the children. But most welcome sight of all, wherever we march, and through whatever town or village we pass, there are familiar greetings awaiting us, in the form of signs over doorways or at street-corners, thus—_A.E.F. Commanding General’s Headquarters_; or, _To A.P.M.’s Office_; or, _American Red Cross Headquarters_. And at each street-crossing, upright, sunburned, and immensely alert, stands an American Military Policeman, directing the tide of country carts, errant cows, antediluvian street-cars, despatch-riders, motor-cycles, and marching troops, with all the solemn austerity of a New York Traffic Cop.