Here everything that moves or lives, it seems, is blue; faded blue, dingy blue, purplish or greenish blue perhaps, but blue nevertheless. Everywhere the color insists. It streaks along the roads in long, broken lines, the meagre trodden villages are blotched and patched with it. Indeed the whole horizon, at this season of the year, might be expressed in just two tones; the almost uniform grey-yellow tint that washes over the fields, the rolling hills, the dusty roads, the squalid villages, and the ever-insistent poilu-blue. You pass by tilled fields labeled _Culture Militaire_; great grey-green aerodromes with flocks of little planes resting in rows beside them, in their gay paint resembling nothing in the world so much as dicky birds fresh from the toy shop; and always dotted here and there over the open fields, the little lonely graves, sometimes hedged in by fences made of sticks and always marked by a grey wooden cross on which hangs, in painted tin, the tricolor. Farther on you come to the world where men live underground, burrowing in the earth like hunted animals. Scattered along the roadside, or in rows under the shelter of a hill-slope, everywhere you look, are dugouts, some with the entrances covered with pine-boughs, others thatched with sticks, still others hidden beneath earth-colored camouflages. We arrived here last night about dusk. The poilus as we passed stared at us as if we were so many lunatics. Rattentout is on the right bank of the Meuse, about six miles from the trenches. This means for one thing that you must carry a gas-mask with you wherever you go. One even sees the little children, what few of them are left, trudging about with small-sized masks slung over their shoulders. The Y. here is short of masks and as yet M.—the only canteen worker besides myself to come with the advance guard—and I have none. This morning when the Chief went out he hung his mask on a peg in the hall. “If anything happens,” he said to M. and me, “you two can settle it between you, which shall have it.” Our home here is in a lordly mansion, evidently the Big House of the village. French officers were living here before we came. The regiment to which they belonged moving out just as we arrived, they graciously made over the house to us. The officers had started a vegetable garden in the back-yard and this they relinquished with deep regret, one young lieutenant fairly having tears in his eyes as he took a last survey of his rows of tiny lettuce and young cabbages. Today is to be given over to house-cleaning, and getting settled. Tomorrow the troops are due to begin detraining at the two points Landrecourt and Dugny and we are to be there to serve them hot chocolate.