All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France we were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat and smiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris, and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thing which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American landscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day's journey. In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading the landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no private automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons of gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at the two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills, and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was a million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up from Bordeaux. But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play with us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with our shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered above us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and for to see," the airplanes.