There was no stopping here. On they went along roads whose wooded sides concealed American artillerymen and artillery. Here was the edge of the front. Guns were actually firing over Kendall’s head at the distant and invisible enemy. He thrilled to this realization.... In a few moments they passed on their left a beautiful château, historic because it had been occupied by von Kluck as headquarters when his armies were rushing onward to meet their defeat at the Marne. The car passed through Bezu, where was an American field hospital occupying a tiny church, its operating-room now in the adjoining building, which had been, a few weeks before, the school crowded with urchins.... But there was neither priest nor school-boy now. All were gone; all had fled before the Hun and were scattered, God knew where, over the face of France. Now Kendall’s driver turned off the main road and shortly another hamlet lay before them—the remnants of the place that had been Domptin. Here a military policeman halted them, demanded credentials and destination. “You walk from here,” he said. “No cars pass over this road by day.” “You know the way?” Ken asked his driver. “Yes.” So they alighted and trudged along the road. Ken observed many little craters by the roadside and in the fields, and, without asking, knew they had been caused by hostile shells.... It was very noisy—or so Kendall fancied. Artillery was at work on all sides of him, but it was only the desultory fire of the quiet day. Though the voices of the guns were audible, neither guns nor the men who served them were to be seen. Kendall’s pulse increased; he felt in the pit of his stomach that electric sensation which always came to him while he stood waiting for the referee’s whistle at the start of a football game. They walked on. Even here, where the affairs of war were unmistakable, there was that exotic sense of peace. The woods were still green, the bushes thick and covered with foliage, the crops, almost ready for the reaper, waving and undulating as the breezes crossed the fields.... No human being was visible. Yet here ahead, to the right and to the left, was the locale of one of the most savage struggles of the war; here it was that the American Second Division was thrown into the line to stop the German as he marched, victory-flushed, upon Paris.... And here the German had stopped.... Just beyond were fields of wheat and woodlands tenanted by no living being, but nevertheless tenanted. In their depths, concealed from the eye, not reachable by any human hand, were the unburied bodies of American dead.... “Here we are,” said Kendall’s driver, pointing to a gray rectangular mass of buildings just ahead. “Paris Farms. Regimental headquarters of the Ninth Infantry.”