The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn to leave Rheims and Joan of Arc bravely flying the French flag before its crumbling cathedral. There is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding. It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are passing. The headlights of our car flash on a continuous procession of motor lorries, munition-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and peasants’ carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive at Epernay for a lunch of red wine and war bread at the little station. By ten o’clock we are safely within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bombardment! It is two days later before the French official _communiqué_ in the daily papers begins again recording: “At Rheims toward six o’clock last night, after a violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans twice stormed our advance posts. But these two attempts completely failed under our machine-gun fire and grenade bombing.” DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE It isn’t what happens necessarily. It’s what’s always-going-to-happen that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists. Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives. Journalists must save their notes. At half-past eleven o’clock that night of my return from Rheims, there is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from America: “Steamship _St. Louis_ here. Your material from London not on it.” The room in which I stand, the Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris all reel unsteadily for an instant. Has the British Government eaten up all my journalistic findings so preciously entrusted to Wellington House? I grasp the brass foot rail of the bed and bring myself upstanding. If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head. Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the _Croix de Guerre_ on his breast, who operates the elevator, I am sure thinks it a woman demented who is going out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But “an _Americaine_,” one can never tell what “an _Americaine_” will do. “Pardon,” he says hesitatingly as I step out, “madame knows the hour?” Yes, madame knows the hour. But an alien may not send a telegram without presenting a passport, the document that never for an instant goes out of one’s personal possession. No messenger can do this errand for me.