They drove rapidly through little villages, between rolling fields cultivated as only the French agriculturist seems to be able to cultivate. The villages, too, were in gala dress and the people in holiday attire. In one place a brief stop was made. Immediately the car was surrounded by children who shouted eagerly for “penny,” for “gu-um,” for “cigarette.” So it was all over France. Let but an American soldier appear and the children of the neighborhood formed a group about him demanding tribute. Soon the civil inhabitants disappeared. Whole villages were occupied by billeted troops, _poilus_ and colonials, black-skinned men wearing red fezzes and speaking strange tongues who gave to the picture an exotic tint. The countryside swarmed with soldiers _en repos_, a zone miles deep crowded with the guardians of Paris and of the Channel ports.... Now came forests in whose depths could be caught fleeting glimpses of huge ammunition-dumps, skilfully camouflaged, then a wonderful woods, clean as the floor of a kitchen, a forest of magnificent trees, but as well kept as a Michigan peach-orchard.... Dusk descended, then darkness. The car seemed to be running into a black curtain upon a thread of white cloud. Kendall could not see the length of his nose to one side or the other, but ahead could be discerned that pale cloud avenue, a sort of milky way that disappeared itself into blackness a hundred feet away. He was now upon one of those roads of white chalk, deep with dust which arose in clouds and nestled in the hair and eyebrows and penetrated the very pores of the skin, giving to men the singular appearance of having been carved out of bronze. Presently the horizon glowed for an instant, as with heat lightning, and glowed again and again. There was a mutter and a grumble ahead which was the distant voice of the guns.... Something burst into flower in the sky far ahead, a vivid rose-blossom, then another and another. It was shrapnel, either our own demanding toll of a prowling German aeroplane or the enemy searching the air for an Allied machine.... The heat lightning became continuous, the roar of the guns a rumble without break, almost a single, sustained note. Ken was riding in the depths of a sea of blackness. To right and left the eyes encountered an _impasse_; ahead was only that dim milky way of road and those upsurging lights as the guns answered one another across the desert of No Man’s Land. The car was traveling at breakneck speed. Suddenly came a tremendous snap almost in Ken’s ears, a snap as of a mountain being cracked in twain by giant hands. There was a blinding flash across the road ahead and the air was usurped by the scream of a departing shell. A battery by the roadside had taken up its work of the night. Kendall was in the midst of it now. Guns on both sides cracked and roared; projectiles screamed over his head, and now and then would come that easily distinguishable sound, the bursting of a German shell....