Last night we took our supper at the dingy little house next door, a surprisingly delicious meal, bread and butter, omelette, salad and cocoa. The house next door is one of the half-dozen or so in town still inhabited by civilians. The family consists of grandmother, mother and little girl of five; the husband is in the trenches. The child Pauline is half sick with a feverish cold. They could get no medicine, the mother fretted; we promised some from Bar-le-Duc. The house itself is painfully unkempt and dirty, yet Pauline is always fresh in a spotless white pinafore, her glossy hair immaculately brushed. This morning we went to the house next door again for bread and coffee. “Did you sleep last night?” asked Madame. “But yes,—and you?” She shook her head. “I was afraid of the Boche aeroplanes. I could hear them overhead.” “But I should think you would be used to them by now.” “Ah! But that makes no difference!” What consideration keeps her here, clinging to the very door-step of the war, as it were, hounded as she is, by terrors? Just the one reason, I suppose,—that she has nowhere else to go. Rattentout, March 15. _Lafayette, nous voilà!_ The first battalions of the division have arrived. The car called for us early this morning to take us to Dugny-Est where half the men are to detrain. We followed along the east bank of the Meuse running parallel to the _Canal de L’Est_. The canal was a dismal sight, filled with an endless line of empty abandoned barges, many of them settling slowly down as if water-logged, a few, already sunk, leaving nothing but a bit of prow protruding above the water’s surface. We ran along the bank for about three miles, then swung across the Meuse to Dugny. Dugny-Est is a half mile north of Dugny proper,—the terminus of a strip of railway taken over and run by American engineers. Viewed from the detraining tracks the landscape was bleak enough; the morasses of the Meuse, strung with barbed-wire beyond, an austere deserted-looking church in the foreground, and, dreariest of all, right under the boys’ feet as they detrained, almost, a large military grave-yard. Arriving at the little stone station-house made over to us for the occasion, we found the chocolate already made. Four of the Y. men had spent the night there and by dint of stoking the fires all night long, as they declared, they had gotten the five huge containers hot. The equipment assembled in haste at Bar-le-Duc was evidently proving none too satisfactory. I had just time to suspend a small American flag from the front of the station-house before the first train puffed up the track. Nothing I think has ever looked quite so good to me as that old American locomotive. It was the first one I had seen in France. I wanted to throw my arms around it and hug it. As one of the boys said afterwards: “Why, you’d be happy just to lie down on the track and let the darned thing run over you.”