We started out shortly after six A. M., on the narrow-gauge bound for Mont Sec. There were five of us on the speeder which is, you must know, a little flat car something like a hand-car, only that instead of being propelled by hand power, it is run by a gasolene motor. Speeders are the jolliest possible way of travelling and they can go like the wind: they possess just two disadvantages, their propensity for having engine trouble, and the ease with which they jump the track at the slightest provocation. It is told how in Abainville the other day a speeder jumped the rails, the engineer, after turning a half a dozen somersaults, picked himself up, squared off, demanded; “Who in hell put the pebble on the track?” From Mauvages we followed the A. and S. to Sorcy. There we switched onto the line which the boys at Abainville used to declare “ran through the trenches.” They would tell me wonderful tales of the trips they had taken on this line; the smoke-stack of the engine protruded over the top, they explained, and “Gosh, you could hear the bullets just splatterin’ against it!” A short ways out from Sorcy we passed the last inhabited village. Ahead of us we could see the barren sinister outline of Mont Sec, that little Gibraltar of the land which the Germans had captured and fortified early in the war, which the French had endeavored to retake in 1915 with the most fearful losses, but which had remained impregnable, commanding, looking down in contempt on our men in their muddy lowland trenches of the Toul Sector, until, on September twelfth, the American Army had taken it along with the rest of the Saint Mihiel salient. As we neared Mont Sec we began to pass devastated villages, some of them mere formless ruins, others from a distance holding the shape and outline of habitable dwelling-places but on approach revealing themselves as mere groups of riddled house-shells. Across the open places stretched interminable grey swathes of rusting tangled wire, “barbed-wire enough to fence Texas,” as one boy put it. On sidings we passed long lines of cars full of salvage, all the junk of war tossed carelessly together. Along the tracks were scattered empty shells and here and there piles of unexploded ammunition. In a shell-hole by the roadside, half filled with water, lay a hob-nailed shoe,—prosaic but pitiful witness of some tragedy. It was the loneliest land, the most forsaken I have ever seen. Far and wide as one looked over the empty plain there was no living, moving creature anywhere.