Last night they bombed Gondrecourt. We were startled out of our sleep by the explosions. Lying in bed I could hear the angry growling gr-gr-gr which distinguishes the German plane, as it flew over Abainville headed back towards the lines. Would it drop another bomb? It seemed to take an interminable time to pass over us. Finally the growling hum grew faint, died away. Then the real excitement of the night began. Swarming into the streets, men, women and children, they proceeded to turn the occasion into a social event. Standing in the square in the moonlight, all talking at once and all talking at the top of their voices, they discussed, narrated, compared, commented, sympathized, while high above all the din I could hear Madame’s voice in semi-hysterical outbursts of emotion. How they could find so much to say about it I can’t imagine. If Hindenburg’s whole army had suddenly appeared in Gondrecourt they couldn’t have been more excited. I went to sleep and left them still busy analyzing, as I took it, their psychological reactions. This morning we learned that the bombs, falling at the edge of the town, had injured nothing except a few trees. “What would you do if they should start to bomb Abainville?” I asked Madame when she brought me my morning toast and chocolate. “I? I would go to the church.” “What you, the infidel! You who never go to mass!” “I know.” Madame smiled a little sheepishly. “And yet all the same, one would feel safer there.” At the canteen a lieutenant who was just finishing his course at Gondrecourt came in. “Nobody can imagine who should have wanted to bomb the school,” he declared, “unless it was some former pupil.” “Why I was told that the Gondrecourt School was the ranking school of France!” I exclaimed. “Made a mistake in the last syllable,” he responded sourly, “it should have been spelled e-s-t.” But if the inhabitants of Abainville have experienced no losses through air-raids yet, they have nevertheless, suffered a minor casualty. Victor, the town simpleton, the genial, harmless Victor, was knocked down by a passing automobile yesterday and became separated from his left ear in the ensuing confusion. Poor wretch! I saw him this morning hobbling down the street with a cane, his head swathed in bandages, but the same old cheerful smile on his half-wit face, as he cocked one eye warily on the look-out for approaching autos. Meanwhile a heated controversy is being waged between the medical officers of Abainville as to whether or not that ear might after all have been saved. Saint Malo, Brittany, September 23. Today I took tea with a Baroness, not only I, but about eighty odd members of the A. E. F. here _en permission_ like myself. Our hostess was an American lady, the widow of a French Baron; the tea a weekly party held at her Château out in the country, to which all boys on leave in this Brittany area are invited.