Dear Mother and Father:

I simply cannot write how I feel about the sinking of the Lusitania. I know that you must feel the same way. Words cannot characterize this latest of a long series of loathsome acts which for all Christendom and for generations must make the name "German" a term of odium and reproach. But words are insufficient. The German government seems indifferent to the contempt and indignation of the rest of the world. It must be forced to conform to the primitive dictates of civilization, if civilization is to endure. I hope with all that is in me that our country will join with the rest of the civilized world in vigorous action against the government that has now added to its hideous record of crimes against other peoples the ruthless and wanton massacre of so many of our own fellow citizens. We who are rich and strong and safe must do our share in saving the future from a return to the Dark Ages, which the triumph of the Germano-Turkish powers would mean.

I can't remember whether I sent you copies of these photographs or not. I took them a month ago in Nieuport, La Panne, and Ypres or along the communicating roads. Since that time what remained of the picturesque old city of Ypres has probably been destroyed. In the picture of the Drapers' Hall which I took, you will see that the roof and windows were all gone and the walls shattered beyond repair. Since then the fighting has been terrific a around Ypres, and this fine old structure is doubtless even more a ruin now than it was then. Our boys in Dunkirk have worked night and day during this fighting and have been constantly under shell fire, but luckily none of them has been even scratched. I have just received a fine tribute to their courage from General Putz, a copy of which I enclose. I can't help feeling a little regretful not to have been able to be with my old section during these great days.

Tuesday, the 11th , I start east again on another inspection trip.

DÉTACHEMENT D'ARMÉE
de BELGIQUE
Etat-Major

Au QG. le 5 Mai, 1915.

Le Général PUTZ
Commandant le détachement d'Armée de Belgique
1er Bureau

à Monsieur ANDREW, Inspecteur du Service
des Ambulances de l'Hôpital Américain.

Monsieur,

Mon attention a été appelée sur les précieux services rendus au Détachement d'Armée de Belgique par la Section Sanitaire Automobile Américaine qui lui est attachée.

Cette Section a dû, en effet, concurremment avec la Section Anglaise, assurer l'évacuation d'Elverdinghe sur Poperinghe des nombreux militaires blessés au cours des récents combats.

Malgré le bombardement d'Elverdinghe, des routes qui y accèdent, et de l'Ambulance même, cette évacuation s'est effectuée nuit et jour, sans interruption, et dans d'excellentes conditions de promptitude et de régularité.

Je ne saurais trop louer le courage et le dévouement dont a fait preuve le personnel de la Section, et je vous serais obligé de vouloir bien lui transmettre mes félicitations et mes remerciements pour l'effort physique considérable qu'il a si généreusement consenti, et les signalés services qu'il a rendus.

Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l'expression de ma considération très distinguée.

(Signé) PUTZ.

On the stationery of the American Ambulance of Paris, Mr. A. Piatt Andrew of East Gloucester, widely known in connection with the currency reform campaign, and later as an opponent of Captain Augustus P. Gardner for the congressional nomination last fall, writes a letter to which we give prominence in another column. In an accompanying note, he says that he could not help writing it, that it expresses what he "feels in the very depths." Such a letter from an earnest and high-minded man deserves careful reading. We commend Dr. Andrew's letter, in spite of our strong disinclination to inflame public feeling at this particular time, when the President's course in steering the ship of state can be none too easy. We have deemed it a duty to urge on our readers some degree of calmness and patience, even though we have never been willing to say any word which would be interpreted as palliative of Germany's offence in the destruction of the Lusitania, or as an indicative of any lack of support of President Wilson in whatever course he may take to maintain the rights of neutrals on the seas.

FROM AN AMERICAN ON THE BATTLE-LINES

To the Editor of the Herald:

We Americans of to-day are onlookers upon one of the greatest struggles in the world's history, and a struggle as clear and crucial in its issue for the future of the earth on which we live as any since history began. We observe a mediæval monarchy in which the people have practically no share in the government , whose representatives respect no right except that of might, who regard no pledge or promise which interferes with their interest as binding, and who sanction the most hideous and inhuman brutalities, attempting to impose itself upon peaceful and unoffending countries.

We have sat silently by while clause after clause of treaties of which we., too, were signatories, were treated as scrap-paper. We have sat silently by while an utterly unoffending nation was devastated, its towns and cities and peaceful farms pillaged and burned, its universities and libraries and churches destroyed. We have sat silently by while 7,000,000 people of this innocent nation were driven from their homes. We have sat silently by while the mediæval monarchy ground monstrous tributes from those who were left. We have sat silently by while officers of this mediæval monarchy allowed their cohorts, drunk with stolen wine, to rape and murder and commit crimes of cannibals and beasts. We have sat silently by while the hordes of this mediæval monarchy swept on through a sister republic, burning everything before them, farmhouses, villages, towns, and cities leaving in their trail scores and scores of cities, and scores of thousands of homes, transformed into chimneys and ashes like Messina or San Francisco after nature's cruel upheavals. We have sat silently by while the world's most wonderful architectural heritages were deliberately and persistently destroyed by incendiary bombs and torches. We have sat silently by while women and children in sleeping towns and villages, uninvested and unfortified and far removed from the contending armies, were assassinated without warning by representatives of this mediæval monarchy. We have sat silently by while other representatives of this mediæval monarchy sent unoffending fishermen and sailors and crews of neutral merchantmen, without warning, to the bottom of the sea. We have sat silently by while the best that civilization has accumulated in international laws, and treaties and humane customs during a thousand years were swept away by a species of hereditary and undemocratic government that our ancestors more than a century ago contended against through seven years of desperate war. We have sat as silent, unmoved witnesses while such a government ruthlessly pursued its course and turned civilization back into the "Kultur" of the eleventh century.

We have expressed no opinion, have taken no side, our President has exhorted us to remain neutral and indifferent as to what might prevail. As representatives of a great democracy we have voiced no protests, we have offered no help, we have not even expressed sympathy with that great peace-loving sister democracy whose ancestors fought with us, and for us during our seven years' struggle for existence, who spent for us thousands and thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars, and to whom we owe our very entity and independence. Not only that, but in the face of all the hideous and revolting facts of the past ten months which are known to every one, our President, after the sinking of the Lusitania, publicly and officially proclaimed "the humane and enlightened attitude hitherto assumed by the Imperial German Government in matters of international right" and "the German views and the German influence in the field of international obligations as always engaged upon the side of justice and humanity."

We have behaved as if our souls were dead and the ideals of the founders of our government were extinct. We have behaved like a soft-bodied man, who, seeing a ruffian beating and kicking and spitting in the face of a woman on the street, looks on for hours with indifference, says that is not his business, shows no resentment until a misdirected blow accidentally strikes him in a tender spot, and then explains his previous inaction on the ground that he had not hitherto observed that the ruffian was not "humane," enlightened," and "engaged on the side of justice."

Is America no longer a country of ideals beyond success in business and the accumulation of material wealth and comfort? Is America no longer capable of making sacrifice except to mammon? Is the generous spirit which animated the founders of our government, and which a century and more ago inspired the admiration of the world, extinct? Do we no longer stand for anything except big railroads, great steel plants, kerosene, beef, wheat, and cotton? As a nation do we represent nothing which makes us worthy of an enduring future? Are we headed on the road to Carthage and Rome?

A. PIATT ANDREW.
Paris, May, 19, 1915.

Dear Mother and Father,:

Week follows week now with great speed, and I am so busy and there is so much that is worth doing and must be done that there is no time left to write.

Last week I went up again to the east, taking with me Dr. du Bouchet, a delightful companion, the head surgeon of the hospital. Summer is really here and the landscape has changed much since my early trips. The trees along the valley of the Marne, which we generally follow on our trips east, are now in full verdure and the branches and trunks torn by shells are not as evident as they were. The little wooden crosses in the fields marking soldiers' graves are often concealed by grass and the coming crops. The pencil inscriptions on the boards, telling that such and such a number fell here on "the field of honor," are disappearing also.

At Pont-à-Mousson, where we spent the first night, I could hear the shells whistling overhead all night long, our shells and theirs, but none struck in the town. The German trenches are only about half a mile away, but for some reason the Germans prefer to send their shells on beyond to towns four or five miles distant. Perhaps they hope sometime to occupy Pont-à-Mousson and are keeping it for expected future use. At any rate, they only drop in two or three shells in the course of every twenty-four hours and let it go at that.

I went up again into the Bois-le-Prêtre, in which "our" army has now practically taken possession of all the trenches clear through to the other side. They are fighting there every night. but the men seem cheerful and gay, and as we went up the slope of the hill we passed hundreds coming back from the trenches with their helmets and sacks covered with bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley, and other wild flowers, picked in the wood. I lunched at Colonel Etienne's headquarters with a crowd of officers, all of whom were lavish in their tributes to the work of our men, and then we pushed on again through beautiful landscapes to Nancy, past the picturesque old cathedral town of St. Nicholas-du-Port, and then through the devastated towns and cities of Lorraine, spending the night in Remiremont. All through this region the figures of Jeanne d'Arc were wreathed with flowers and draped with flags, as it was near the date of her anniversary and Lorraine was her birthplace.

Next day, Thursday, the 13th, we ran down to Alsace and to Thann, passing many pretty processions of boys and girls dressed in white, preparing for their first communion, usually accompanied by their mothers and priests carrying decorated candles and brilliant banners.

On the way back we passed through Sermaize, Pargny, Etrepy, and several other towns that were destroyed by the Germans on their barbarous invasion last September. They are sad beyond words, nothing but chimneys as far as you can see. In Sermaize I saw the ruins of a beautiful church bearing over the door the date 1083, which had been deliberately burned by the Germans. In the ruins of this roofless church stood a figure of Jeanne d'Arc, her flag shot from her hands, which still grasped the staff. The figure was almost miraculously devoid of scratches, and about its base French soldiers had placed several empty German shell cases filled with fresh flowers.

At Nancy I bought two dolls for Helen and Polly, dressed in the old costumes of Lorraine, and in Thann, where shells are crashing in every day, I recently bought two dolls decorated by a local milliner in the picturesque black coiffure and gay dress of Alsace. I will send them in a day or two. Tell the children to keep them always because of the time and place from which they come, Nancy and Thann, in Lorraine and Alsace, in May of the year of the great war, 1915.

In Bois-le-Prêtre, I picked up a German cap. Perhaps the soldier who wore it was buried among the neighboring trees, perhaps he is a prisoner. I am sending it to you to keep for me. Please place it over Bernstorff's picture in my library, covering his face.

I am leaving this morning for Dunkirk in the north for a couple of days to see our boys, who must have had much to do these last weeks in the terrible fighting around Ypres. We have twenty ambulances up there now, and most of them are stationed near Poperinghe in the thick of it all. They tell me the Canadians fought like heroes night after night and day after day with bayonets and swords and knives in hand-to-hand contests. How many unnamed heroes there are of whom history will never know what they did!

Things are going well now everywhere. Italy is presently coming in. Roumania, we hope, will follow. I feel it more deeply than I have ever felt anything that my country, great and powerful as she is, and supposedly interested in the survival of justice and right, should have remained an unmoved onlooker in the great struggle. There never was a clearer issue between right and wrong. Never in our lifetime, or in our country's history, has there been an issue so momentous, or one in which, considering our history and past ideals, we ought to have been so much concerned, but what can we hope for? How can our country be expected to recognize its obligations or its opportunities, with its President, according to report, absorbed in flirtations, and Bryan, of the vacuous mind, in charge of our foreign affairs?

Dear Mother and Father:

It was a beautiful drive from Paris to-day, about two hundred miles through a landscape that has become much embellished since last I saw it, a month or so ago. Everything is rampantly green, except the flowering white and purple wistaria which hangs over doorways, and the high white stuccoed walls and the red-tiled roofs of the villages. I have worked hard these last days, and was glad to slip into a comfortable position in the motor and watch the world roll by, and dream. France is too gentle, too peaceful, too civilized, too beautiful to be at war. This I kept thinking as we swept on.

We made the trip without incident, stopping for lunch at Beauvais, where a month ago our boys, who are now so busy at Pont-à-Mousson, were fretting day after day in comparative idleness. When I saw them last week up there, all of the other ambulances had been called back and they alone were performing the service of transporting the wounded for the region centring around Pont-à-Mousson and Bois-le-Prêtre, and the work was so arduous, extensive, and important that we sent them another ten machines this week. Beauvais no longer has any particular interest for me except for a single French official, Captain Neumoger, whose office is there and whom it is a pleasant duty from time to time to see.

At Montreuil we passed through the usual crowds of khaki-uniformed "Tommies." In Boulogne we passed many picturesque Hindus, now dressed in khaki-colored turbans and khaki coats and breeches, --- a curious uniform, half British and half Oriental. Some of their officers looked quite magnificent, great tall fellows with large khaki turbans and smart English walking-coats, and carrying canes like swanking British officers. Near Calais, where we ran again into the Belgian sector, a young Belgian soldier asked us to give him a lift, which we are always glad to do for any soldier, but especially a Belgian. He was an attractive-looking young fellow about twenty-one, and he told us that his home was in Antwerp and that his mother lived there still, but not a word had he been able to hear from her since the German invasion of last August. "I have just got back my hundred and third letter," he said. He had sent the letters by way of England, but they had been returned a hundred and three times without reaching Belgium. So I told him to give me a letter to his mother and I would try and get it through by means of our Embassy.

Dunkirk we reached just before dark, in time to see its desolate streets, most of its windows broken or boarded over, most stores and restaurants closed, most houses abandoned, and here and there groups of houses in ruins. We found our hotel open, and here I found my old friend, the Comtesse Benoist d'Azy, who has remained through all the bombardments and still goes every day to the railway-station hospital, although the station has been the particular goal of the German shells. We had a good talk, and to-morrow I shall look up our men who have moved out I into the suburbs.

Good-night.

Friday night we spent quietly enough in the hotel at Dunkirk. There were no shells, and in fact none had dropped in the town for a week. We heard many stories, however, of the recent bombardments. It seems incredible but the shells, which without warning began to drop in Dunkirk about a month ago and of which more than a hundred have fallen in the intervening time, came from about thirty-six kilometres --- more than twenty-two miles --- away. They are as tall as a man, and even the steel cap, of which Colonel Morier showed me several, was so heavy that I could not lift it. Think of it, a projectile six feet high, and weighing at least a ton and a half, thrown twenty-two miles! The explosion of one of these projectiles is enough to destroy utterly two or three store buildings and contiguous houses. One heard no anticipatory sound, one could not hear the report of the departure of the shell twenty-two miles away, and since, when the shell reached its goal, its force was spent, there was not even a whir or a whistle; but suddenly, out of the clear and silent sky, came a vast explosion, and houses and stores fell in and dust and smoke and fragments of stone and timber mounted into the air as in a volcanic eruption. People and wagons on the street were blown to atoms. One shell struck in the cemetery as an interment was taking place, and the coffin and nine or ten mourners, mostly women and children, were transformed into débris in the twinkling of an eye. Another struck on the street near the convent where we used to be billeted, and killed a group of children at play; nobody knew exactly how many, the fragments were so scattered. Little wonder that the people have deserted Dunkirk, and that the streets, which a month ago were gay with the uniforms of several nations, are now deserted and silent, and its homes tenantless.

Our section of ambulances is divided now into two squads of ten each. Half the men and machines remain in Dunkirk doing the same good work as formerly at the station, in which however only one train now arrives per day. The men live in a comfortable villa at Malo, a summer resort suburb of Dunkirk on the shore. The other half are stationed at Poperinghe, in Belgium, not far from Ypres, and we shall run down there and see them to-day.

Poperinghe is a Flemish town, perhaps twenty or twenty-five miles from Dunkirk, and the roads leading to it are thronged with convoys and soldiers, so we had to run slowly, but we ran through a pretty country, with great windmills and little thatched-roofed cottages, surrounded by bright-colored gardens and highly cultivated farms.

On the way we passed a procession of a hundred or more German prisoners, and with the permission of the French cuirassier who rode at their. head, I took several photographs of them as they trudged by. The cuirassier was more than pleased to be snapped in such surroundings, and wheeled his horse into the foreground so as almost to obscure the prisoners.

Poperinghe is chock-a-block with soldiers, English. and French. It is about three or four miles from Ypres and six or seven miles from the famous Yser Canal, about which Germany and the Allies have been fighting continuously and furiously for so many weeks.

Our boys are stationed in a farmyard near the town. Some of them sleep on stretchers in a little room in the farmhouse, others sleep in the straw in the loft of the barn. They take their meals in the brick-floored kitchen-living-room of the little farmhouse, surrounded by dirty, babies, a dog, several hens, and a goat --- an environment which suggests the pictures of Teniers and some of the Flemish painters of long ago.

My old ambulance was here, and Campbell, who used to be my orderly, but who drives it now, insisted that I must drive it again, so just before dark, we started out with me at the wheel. Practically all their work now is night work. They go pretty near to the front and would be exposed in the daytime to rifle fire as well as to the cannon fire of the enemy. We stopped at Elverdinghe, where our section was stationed a few weeks ago, but which has been torn by shells into crumbling ruins.

Then, as darkness descended, we went on to the dressing-stations on the edge of the Yser Canal, --- first to Zuydcote and then to Boesinghe. We had to crawl over the road without any lights, even oil lamps, and one has to watch carefully for the dark spots on the road, which are shellholes, usually three or four feet deep, and at unexpected intervals and which would capsize your machine if you happened to run into one.

As we got closer to the Canal and the line, the din of the guns became greater and greater. It goes on incessantly day and night, and one gets so accustomed to it as not to notice it from a distance, where it sounds like the rumble of thunder, but as we approached, it grew louder and louder, with boom! crash! boom! It seemed like the night of the Fourth of July; cannon firecrackers seemed to be exploding everywhere, with packages of little crackers sputtering at intervals (the crackle of musketry). You were startled every now and then by a terrific explosion right near at hand., and were relieved to know that it was only a "départure" from one of our own concealed batteries. But perhaps a few seconds later you heard the whistling whir of a German shell as it passed on over your head to its destination, a mile or two back. Meanwhile, as far as you could see along the line of the trenches the sky was bright with rockets. In order to keep the enemy from charging across under cover of darkness, each side continuously sends up rockets which drop brilliant lights in the sky hung from small parachutes. They last for a minute or so and illumine the landscape with intense white light. I wish I could convey to you my impression of that scene --- the dark night, the sky flashing with explosions of shrapnel, the line of rockets and glowing stars, the roar and din of the cannon incessant as the noise of a factory, every now and then a thick crackle of small arms, probably meaning that some one had been caught crawling out of his trench, or that a company was attempting an attack. In the midst of it all, there were several claps of real thunder, but God's thunder was nothing as compared to man's.

Eventually we reached the dressing-station, a Flemish farmhouse., whose interior was lighted by a single candle, and here were two men badly wounded, lying in the straw on the floor. We carried them out to our ambulance and then threaded our way back through the dark, shell-torn road to the tent hospital in Woesten, which is a halfway post, a "relai d'ambulance" on the route to the base hospital, where the more seriously wounded can be treated at once. We took our men into the tent, and as one of them had been shot in the breast he was immediately put on the table. It is the same story that has happened hundreds of thousands of times in the last ten months and I won't harrow you with the details. The poor boy had already lost much blood, and before morning he had doubtless given his life for his country, dying without a friend or acquaintance near, lying on the ground in a dimly lighted tent in Belgium.

We made other trips during the night to other "postes de secours," and at about two o'clock I got back to the farm near Poperinghe and crawled up in the barn loft and went to sleep in the sweet-smelling hay.

I am afraid you cant read these scrawls. I carry them about in my pocket and scribble as I get time.

A letter has just come from you dated as late as May 14. enjoyed the clippings about Roosevelt's libel suit and the Riggs Bank suit and the editorials from Western papers about the Lusitania massacre. One gets very little news in the European papers about American domestic matters. Roosevelt's trouble and the Riggs Bank troubles do not bulk very large to the people over here, as compared with their own troubles, so I am only able to keep au courant with things at home through what you send.

We have a new ally in Italy, and the Italian flag has been added everywhere to the groups of allied flags displayed on the fronts of buildings in Paris. We should all be proud and happy to see our Stars and Stripes along with the rest. It seems craven and ignoble that we are not lending our little aid in this great struggle.

"'T is man's perdition to be safe
When for the truth he ought to die."

Yesterday I came across this hideous bit of travesty:

"Too proud to fight, to right a wrong,
Too wise to talk with wisdom, too mighty to be strong,
Fail Columbia!"

How can one be really happy here in the midst of such unflinching sacrifice and courage, realizing that through the weakness of a few men America has become vulnerable to such thrusts as this?

I have read Church's "American Verdict on the War" which you sent and regard it as a powerful document. Would that every intelligent German could have a copy of it. They apparently know so little about the crimes their government has committed and about the verdict of the rest of the world upon them. A letter came the other day from President Eliot, commenting sympathetically upon my little screed in the " Boston Herald" about France's part in the war.

I also received the enclosed very kind commentary from my old friend, Ambassador Jusserand:

My dear Mr. Andrew:

Your charming and most interesting letter arrived yesterday, and must have crossed at mid-ocean one which I had written to you and which has gone to the bottom with the last victim of German barbarity, the unfortunate Lusitania.

I expressed in it the great interest and feeling of gratitude with which I had read your note printed in the "Boston Herald" on April 28. It was very cheering to read your favorable account of the stubborn defense we are making, and, thank Heaven! a little more than defense nowadays. I hope that the movement forward will soon be continued. The deeds of the "kultured" people ought to give to all liberal-minded men, and such are all our soldiers, a new impetus in their desire to wipe off the face of the earth not their nation, but their system.

Don't think that such snapshots as you sent us were less interesting for us than for the tall, thin, handsome man who appears in them, and in whom I recognize with glee my former tennis partner, under what he calls the "ancien régime." These little bits of landscape which appear in them seem to us lovable. We wish it were possible for us to kiss the trees, the plants, the stones on the road.

A pity you were not sent sooner and were not present in what must have been a very memorable occasion when, in the former sous-préfecture of Thann, French rule was established again, a tribunal was instituted, and, for the first time after almost half a century, the sitting was inaugurated with these solemn words: "Au nom du peuple français."

I cannot tell you how deeply grateful we are, with all our compatriots, for what Americans are doing, for their sympathy, their warm-heartedness, their help of every kind. May good luck attend you and all you undertake, and please tell all the Americans with whom you may be in contact what our feeling is and what an important thing they are doing in sealing again and in rejuvenating, so that it may live forever, the old friendship that was established in the days of the War of Independence.

Believe me, my dear Mr. Andrew, with warm sympathy and gratitude,

Very truly yours,

JUSSERAND.

Dear Mother and Father:

I have spent a busy week here in Paris, mostly at my desk, and there is not as much as usual of interest to write about. Still, every day yields stirring impressions that I should like to record, if only time could be found. The experience that stands out clearest in my memory is the ceremony in the Sorbonne of last Saturday afternoon, when the great men of France, in the amphitheatre of the University, gave expression to their gratitude to the people of the United States for what we have done for them during the war. The President of the Republic was there, several members of the Cabinet, and a great many members of the Academy, writers and artists were gathered on the stage. A large French chorus had been trained to sing our American songs, and the ceremony opened, when, upon the arrival of the President and our Ambassador, the chorus rose and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" and then the "Marseillaise." As always in France, everything was arranged with excellent taste. There were no uniformed soldiers, for this was a ceremony of peace, having only to do with the peaceful services which a neutral country has been rendering. The great writers and artists of France had contributed two immense albums of tributes in verse and prose and paintings and drawings expressive of the homage of the French people to America, a form of voicing appreciation of which only Frenchmen would have dreamed. Gabriel Hanotaux, one of the most brilliant writers and historians, gave a brief, eloquent, and heartfelt address which could not but bring a response from the heart of every Frenchman and American in the audience.

It was all beautifully and simply arranged, and yet it was one of the most humiliating and disappointing experiences I have ever had., for at the end of M. Hanotaux's carefully prepared address, the Ambassador of the United States had to respond, and accept on behalf of the American people the tributes which had been paid. Probably never since the time of Franklin has the American representative in France had such an opportunity to participate in as memorable an occasion or in so distinguished an assemblage. Certainly never in his life will the gentleman from Ohio have such a chance to utter one or two phrases that might be historic, and that would reverberate over the world. But alas! irrelevant and uninspired ideas were never expressed in more commonplace English, never have I heard a more rambling, long-winded, ill-prepared address. Here in France, in this prodigious period, in this touching setting, in the presence of most of the distinguished men in France, he rambled on for three-quarters of an hour, as if he had been caught unprepared, even making jokes, --- poor ones at that, --- talking very much as he might at a Methodist Church "sociable" in Elyria, if his wife had been unexpectedly presented with a "kitchen shower." I doubt whether there was an American present, except perhaps the little wife, who did not want to hide his head for shame. It was not that one expected him to express the hope that France would win, or anything else that was unneutral, but one did expect him to use correct English and to speak with dignity, good taste, sympathy, and feeling. There were only two consoling thoughts. Very few of the audience could understand English, and knew how second-rate it all was --- and the other very slightly consoling thought was that he did not really represent the United States, but the minority of American people, who, because of the contest between Taft and Roosevelt, happen to be in power. One felt this last consolation the more when on various occasions in his speech, Mr. Sharp alluded with characteristic campaign stump-speech drawl to that "gra-a-a-te Amurican statesman, and Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan."

I am off to-day again for the East.

P. S. I telegraphed you yesterday that I have received your letters regularly. I get five or six a week and also many clippings, all of which bring great pleasure, even if I do not acknowledge them.

Dear --------:

From one or two letters that I have recently received it would appear that some disgruntled ex-member of our service has disseminated the notion that outside of Paris the American Ambulance has not been doing very serious work. It seems even to have been implied that the General Staff of the French army was not inclined to entrust to our sections service actually at the front. To one who knows the real situation, this is surprising and disappointing, because utterly contrary to the facts.

The real facts, which you and the others in America who are working for the Ambulance should know, are these: that every one of our field sections, without exception, is working as far forward as the most advanced French sections conducted by enlisted soldiers, and that some of our sections because of the peculiar availability of our cars, and the unusual devotion and courage of our men, are working nearer the actual battle-line than even the French cars. All this is attested by numerous letters from French generals and other officials, as, for instance, General Putz and General Le Boc, and by the request which has been made by the General Staff that we provide additional sections of twenty cars each, as rapidly as we can.

It may be of interest to you to know somewhat more specifically the character of the work being done by some of our field sections. The section in the north, which, for convenience, we have called the Dunkirk section, is now divided into two parts with ten ambulances in each. One part is stationed at the railway station in Dunkirk, where it serves the evacuation hospital, located in the freight house. Our men carry wounded from this evacuation hospital to more than a score of hospitals in Dunkirk, Malo, Bergues, Bourbourg, Gravelines, Zuydcote and other towns, and they also bring back the convalescents from these hospitals to the trains which carry them to hospitals and resting-places in the interior of France. As you know, Dunkirk has been bombarded by the heaviest artillery during the last month. Shells as tall as a man and seventeen inches in diameter have dropped into Dunkirk from batteries located thirty-eight kilometres distant. They dropped without any preliminary warning and their explosion utterly annihilates everything within range. During these bombardments our men have rendered great service in picking up the killed and wounded on the streets. Fortunately, none of our men or machines have suffered any injury, but this work has been carried on in the midst of very real danger.

The other part of our northern section is stationed at Poperinghe, where the men live and eat in a little Flemish farmhouse just outside the town. Some of the men sleep in the straw in a barn loft and the rest sleep on stretchers in a small room in which all the men also eat. One man goes back with a machine each day to Dunkirk, and is replaced by a man from Dunkirk, who brings out another machine with meat already cooked and other supplies. Thus the personnel changes every ten days, and the men who have been working about Poperinghe are able to live more comfortably for ten days at Malo, a seaside resort near Dunkirk, where they are billeted, and while there they are able to work under more favorable conditions upon their machines. The men at Poperinghe have very little to do in the daytime, but at night, without phares or oil lamps, they set out after dark over rough pavements, in many cases badly torn by shells, and creep along some seven or eight miles on the road to Woesten, where is located the tent hospital ("relai d'ambulance"), called the Ambulance Marocaine. Formerly, they went to Elverdinghe, somewhat nearer Ypres, but during the last three or four weeks Elverdinghe has been virtually destroyed by shells, and the chateau which served as a hospital was hit a number of times and had to be evacuated. From the relay-tent hospital in Woesten they get their orders for the various "postes de secours" along the Yser Canal, and so the ambulances move along in groups of two or three to Boesinghe, Zuydcote, and other villages where in little Flemish farmhouses are located the dressing-stations.

The wounded are brought here directly from the trenches or roads on which they have fallen and are carried back from these primitive stations to the tent hospital in Woesten. Our men often make several trips during the night. They are sometimes in the very midst of a deafening thunder of cannon fire, and crackling musketry, and rockets and fusées from the French and German trenches, one fourth of a mile -away, illumine the night as for a holiday celebration.

We have, as you know, two sections in the east, one in Alsace and one on the frontier of Lorraine. The section working in Alsace is stationed at St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, a clean little village in the Vosges, about three or four miles this side of the former frontier and surrounded by lofty mountains. From here, our cars go each day up over the pass and through the tunnel, which leads into what, a year ago, was German territory, and then, down a zigzag road through a series of picturesque little towns to various hospitals at Moosch, St. Amarin, and Kruth, where the wounded arrive in hand-carts or on mule-back, from the surrounding heights, Hartmannsweilerkopf and Guebweiler, often after trips of seven, eight or ten hours, through trenches and mountain paths, in regions where there are no roads.

The following account from one of our men in this section gives a good idea of the daily work:

The service of Section Z, which is the military designation of the section attached to the army of the Vosges, is the fetching of wounded from the evacuation hospitals in the recaptured province of Alsace to the rail-head hospitals on the French side over a picturesque and difficult pass. The drivers are subject to the same discipline as that governing the soldiers, eat the regular army ration that is issued daily, and are billeted on the townspeople. Every morning at half-past six some of our cars go over the pass and report for duty at the main evacuation hospital. This place is in a valley, just behind the high summits commanding the valley of the upper Rhine, where the fiercest fighting in the east has taken place and is still going on. The sound of artillery fighting echoes almost continuously from the guns in Hartmannsweilerkopf, for which, as the papers have daily stated, the contest is unremitting, the French holding and the Germans attacking. The majority of our wounded come from this battle-front. They are brought down on man and mule-back, the journey often taking a whole day. At the entrenched line, of course, they receive first aid and the attention of the battalion surgeons.

The cars are all capable of carrying three stretcher cases and one seated beside the driver, or four seated, and the experience has been that the unique spring suspension and light body construction make our cars the most comfortable for the wounded of all the types in service.

The daily routine includes an afternoon service of our cars to the same hospitals. After a vigorous action, especially on the offensive, our whole section may be rolling back and forth over the pass through the night. Usually this work is from another evacuation hospital to the north established in a big German cotton-mill, where the wounded straggle in all night and wait their turns with the busy, brown-bloused surgeons, in a big storeroom lighted by acetylene light.

The donors of the ambulances would be quite satisfied of the high value of their gifts if they could once witness the courage and gayety under torture of the magnificent French soldiers. Every one of them has thought the question out for himself, and every one of them is sure that he, personally, is serving the cause of justice in a contest of civilization against barbarism, and the reasoning has not been based on assumed or hypothetical premises, but on the grimmest of horrible facts. When they are set down at the end of their hour's ride in the American ambulances, almost without exception they make some cheerful expression of gratitude, the accumulation of which would mean much to the givers of the cars.

So much for the work of our section which the French Government has sent into the romantic region of the regained province. The other section in the east consists of twenty ambulances with a supply-car and a pilot car, as in the north, and which we expect will be the standard size of all our future sections. It is located not more than five or six miles from the German frontier, about fifteen or twenty miles north of Nancy. These American ambulances are the only ambulances in a region where there are continual engagements. The men live in barracks and private houses in the town of Pont-à-Mousson, which has been bombarded no less than a hundred times and which is located no more than eight or nine hundred metres from the German trenches. Our machines run up to the dressing-stations on the edge of the Bois-le-Prêtre and carry the wounded soldiers from these dressing-stations to the hospitals in half a dozen towns five or ten miles back from the lines. Our men run for miles within range of the German shells, and much of the time within sight of the German lines.

The following excerpt from a letter just received from one of our men gives a good idea of the work of this section:

The final proof of confidence is, of course, in the work entrusted to us. This includes going out at night to Montauville and Clos Bois, stations behind the trenches, to bring in wounded who have received first aid, often a dangerous service, the whole district being under fire. It is interesting to note the comparative indifference of the people to shell fire. When the sound is heard of the approaching missile, some --- not many --- draw into doorways. Several groups of women to-day stood exposed, watching the explosions, and children continued their games. We had sat down to dinner before the firing ceased. Suddenly Jonin ran in and said two ambulances were needed down at the station. McConnell and Willis immediately volunteered and went down. They brought in three injured, of whom one died half an hour later. Firing recommenced at nine and continued on and off all night. There were no further casualties.

A general description of day and night trips to Montauville may be of interest. On receipt of orders, the ambulance next in turn proceeds through the streets of Pont-à-Mousson (sometimes in itself an exciting experience, the town being subject to intermittent shell fire at all times), crosses the railway, and threading its way through convoys of supply-wagons or bodies of troops, comes after three kilometres to Montauville. This is a village straggling along the road, with orchards, gardens, and little woods on either side; on the right hand, outward journey, can be seen the French third line of trenches crossing a hillside lopped with wood --- the beginnings of Bois-le-Prêtre. In all the houses soldiers are quartered. There are four "postes de secours " and from one of these the ambulance takes the wounded who are waiting. Clos Bois lies farther along the road, halfway up the hillside; there is no village, a farm-building serving as dressing-station. At night the same route is followed, but as no lights are carried it is sometimes not easy to keep to the road. We have often found it necessary for an orderly to accompany each driver on night trips for help in case of accident, and, on very dark nights, to go ahead and show the way. During an attack this night work is an experience not to be forgotten. The air is full of the growl of cannon reverberating between the hills, and from time to time a ghastly glare is thrown over the scene by phosphorus bombs held suspended by parachutes which are sent up to uncover the enemy's bayonet charges. All the time the darkness is made visible by the flashes of guns and exploding shells.

This section last week carried 1650 wounded, and in no week since their arrival in the east have they carried less than one thousand.

Such, told briefly and in glimpses, are some of the services that our American youths are rendering to-day in France, and these services are deeply appreciated by, the French people. I could cite letter after letter from distinguished French officials in confirmation of this. I will only quote from one recently addressed to us by the president of an important committee of the Chamber of Deputies, after a visit by that committee to our several sections. It read as follows:

I have the honor to thank you in the name of the Commission on Public Hygiene for the enlightened and devoted service which the American Ambulance lavishes upon our wounded. In the sad hours through which we are passing it is particularly sweet for us to know that friendly hands are quick to help our brothers who are so courageously giving their blood in defence of our country.

I hope the good people of Boston, who care for France and who want to express their sympathy with France in this calamitous period, will respond to your appeal and will help us to go on with and extend the work.

A. PIATT ANDREW.

Dear Mother and Father:

I have begun many letters to you these last three weeks, only to be interrupted, and to allow so long an interval to elapse before resuming, that I have started and restarted again. Since I last wrote you, I have been again in the east, visited our sections at Pont-à-Mousson and the Vosges, had a wonderful mountain drive in Alsace over the Col du Blamont and the Col de la Grosse Pierre, not very far from which the French are now fighting their way toward Munster; and since then I have been back again to the north and visited our section which was in Dunkirk, but which now is located at Coxyde, near Nieuport, and one night I went out with them to the dressing-stations around Nieuport, where we picked up wounded Zouaves and marines in the cellars, the only places still available around Nieuport for dressing-stations.

Meanwhile, Buswell arrived, and my spare moments were absorbed with him. It seemed as if we were back in Gloucester, as he brought a thousand fresh impressions of Harry and Jack, and C. B. and Isabella and C. S. S. and the two generations of Patches. We lunched and dined together, chatted, strolled, shopped, disputed, and were very happy, and almost forgot about the war for three or four days. It seemed like a real vacation, and when he went (I sent him to Pont-à-Mousson) I had to plunge again into details to forget how I missed him.

But the war still goes on. One can forget it for a time in the bright sunshine of Paris ---but not for long. Paris is neither gay nor sad. It is always beautiful beyond any other city in the world. The great avenues and boulevards seem as thronged as usual with automobiles and the broad sidewalks are thick with people. The public buildings and most large private buildings are bright with the grouped flags of the Allies. (I used to hope some day to see the Stars and Stripes where they ought to be among the other flags., but our days of chivalry and idealism ---one might now add of national self-respect --- seem gone.) One sees many variously colored uniforms of soldiers back for a few days from the front or of wounded soldiers here to recuperate, but there is no mock gayety as apparently is the case in Berlin and Vienna. There is no music in any of the restaurants or cafés; there are no public dances. People who dine out do not wear evening clothes, but go in their uniforms or day clothes. Only about half the theatres are open, and most plays have to do with Alsace or Lorraine, or the war, and the performances generally end with the "Marseillaise," everybody standing. At the opera, they often close the performances with a patriotic scene, half pantomime, half song, with orchestral accompaniment, representing life in the trenches, with the bugle calls and a picture of the men sleeping on the ground, while one of them reads a letter from home by the light of the moon; then there is a night attack, and far away you hear the sputter of muskets, and finally a distant shout, growing louder and louder, and you know they are charging; then a great cheer meaning success, and presently as the dawn breaks a hundred or more soldiers come scrambling out of the trenches and run into the foreground with their regimental flag, reporting victory. To end the scene Marthe Chenal, the great soprano of the opera, representing France, dressed in glittering helmet and cuirass, sings the "Marseillaise," making a great drama of it, and with the rousing soldiers' chorus and the booming drums and the trumpets, one feels ready to die the next minute for France.

At the Français, they give a sweet little play of Alsatian life called "L'ami Fritz," by Erckmann-Chatrian. It is a bucolic piece, appealing to the simplest sentiments, and is prettily "set." At the end comes a wedding party in an Alsatian "parlor," in which all of the great actors of the company are gathered in simple Alsatian clothes, and, one after another, each sings an Alsatian song, or recites an Alsatian poem, the great tragedian Mounet-Sully, and the great tragédienne, Segond-Weber, and all the rest.

Another night, they give "Colette Baudoche," a dramatization of the book of Maurice Barrès, in which the scene is laid in Metz (in old Lorraine) about 1910. The city has been invaded with Germans, the architecture vulgarized, the atmosphere of life grossened, but the old "dames de Metz," though often poor, hold aloof from the German newly rich. The story is of an old French family named Baudoche--the widowed mother who has to take boarders, and her daughter. They take a German high-school teacher to board, good-hearted and sentimental, but rather rough and lacking in intuition. He is very persistent in his attentions and finally persuades the daughter to agree to marry him, much to her mother's concealed distress. Then comes the day in September, when in the church in Metz they have the annual service in memory of the French soldiers who died for their country in 1870. The daughter goes to the service and is overcome by her love for France and concludes that she ought never to marry a German. She comes home and announces her decision. The German teacher is baffled and loses his temper. "One can never understand these French," he says. "In France, the conquest is never finished." And so the play ends, and everybody applauds, thinking of the battle of the Marne, and how near to and how far from a conquest the Germans then came.

So much for the lighter side of life during the war.

Gradually the world is coming to recognize the glorious and valiant stand which France has made. Even the London "Times" is now printing a series of articles under the title of "The Achievement of France," to show the English people that it is the army of France which is bearing the brunt of the war and that England has done practically nothing on the land. To-day, after eleven months, her front does not extend over thirty-five miles, and even that front is not as far advanced as it, was six months ago. Eleven months of the war have passed, and she is not yet making any substantial contribution to it with her army. Her sector resembles a piece of pie --very wide in the rear, running all the way from, Calais to Havre, but gradually contracting as it gets toward the firing line. Her total losses in dead, according to Mr. Asquith's statement of a few days ago, amount only to about fifty thousand, a considerable number, to be sure --- but in France the dead are supposed to number close to three hundred and fifty thousand, and only the other day in the terrible -fighting north of Arras, I am told that France lost nearly fifty thousand dead and wounded. So it is all along the five hundred miles of the French front. Night after night the cannonading and shooting go on, subterranean mines are exploded., French soldiers are fighting metre by metre through barbed wire, charging or resisting charges from trench to trench, with hand grenades, bayonets, and. knives, in the woods, in the fields, through villages, around farmhouses, and even. in the cellars. I come moderately close to it only at points. No human mind can picture the whole. But France, gentle, peace-loving country that she is, pays almost all of the cost with the lives and bodies of her sons.

The English mentality is hard for an American to understand. Many Englishmen seem unable to think of the war in other terms than those of sport: war is the biggest sporting proposition , the biggest game hunting which the world has to offer. As I pass through the English lines, I not infrequently see handsome English officers, trimly uniformed, on beautiful mounts, returning with their polo mallets from an afternoon game. Some of them have brought over their hounds and hunt across the fields. War does not seem to them a vitally serious proposition. Their country is not invaded; in fact, it can't be invaded, their navy will see to that. It is true that the war must be won on the land, not on the sea. It is also true, as the London "Times" says, that "one is fighting for England just as truly in the Pas de Calais, as we should be on the soil of Kent." But one must not get excited about these damned Germans. Given time, they will tire themselves out. That seems to be the point of view of many Englishmen.

French officers are very reticent in speaking of this. They naturally refuse to criticize their ally, and unless they know you very intimately, they pass over any remarks about the English attitude in silence, or with some such remark as, "Yes, the English mentality is different from ours"; or, "They seem to have great difficulty over there in getting sufficient ammunition"; or, "England is helping enormously on the sea"; or, "England is the great reserve upon which we can depend for the future." One whom I know very well, however, said the other day, with a smile, "Now that Italy has ceased to be neutral, we hope that Kitchener's army will follow her example."

There is no question in any one's mind here as to the outcome of the war. German domination is inconceivable, and cost what it may, the war will be carried on until the German system is crushed. Remembering the German attitude toward treaties, the Allies will not allow of any compromise based on German pledges. Even though it take years, they are ready to push the war to an uncompromising end. The advantage which Germany had at the start through her preparedness must sooner or later be offset by the effective organization which has been developed on our side, and, of course, the reserve resources of the Allies in men and supplies are indefinitely greater than those of the Germanic-Austro-Turkish alliance.

But oh, the pity of it: that America has so failed to recognize her opportunity. Never again will a tremendous issue be so clear as between right and wrong. Never again shall we have so vast a chance to help in making right prevail. It is for America, the one great disinterested judge among the nations of the world, to speak firmly for the sanctity of contracts between nations , and for the rights of small and unoffending countries to "life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It is for America to denounce officially sanctioned vandalism, arson, and murder, and to insist upon the elemental necessities of human civilization. The smaller neutral countries, especially the Balkan countries, are only waiting to follow her lead. If America did her duty, the Germans, even despite the bad attack of "big head" with which they are now so grossly afflicted, would be forced to recognize what the future has in store for them, that they are the enemies of the whole world which they cannot hope to vanquish, and that the eventual cost for them must become more staggering each day that the war is prolonged. It lies in the power of one man, and his name is Wilson, to bring this, home to the German people, to expedite the ending of the most terrible calamity which has ever befallen the earth, and to prevent the sacrifice of additional hundreds of thousands of human lives. It is safely within the facts to say that upon Woodrow Wilson hangs the fate --- the continued life of millions of men.

I am loath to believe that we, as a nation, have reached such a sophisticated point in our development that chivalry and sacrifice for others seem utopian. I am loath to believe that we have become so well fed, sodden, and complacent that we would not willingly run any risks to help preserve justice, freedom, and civilization. I am unwilling to believe that as a people we have lost all national pride and self-respect and such respect for American citizenship as would make us resent the wholesale massacre of our countrymen, and the German Government's insolent evasions and delays, in replying to our protests and the Kaiser's conferring on the murderer of more than a hundred American men, women, and children the highest honors in his command. The outside world looks on with disappointment at what seems like America's degradation, but I will not admit that the American people are responsible. They have been misguided, and to a great extent misrepresented, by the timid and faltering pacificism of Wilson and Bryan.

P.S. Yes, I got the clippings of my "Herald" article, and am glad that you liked it. Dr. Powers's "reply" shows how little he knows about the way Germany is carrying on the war. He spoke of the great zeal shown by the individual German soldiers; but he probably does not know that the German infantry is forced to march in serried ranks in order to prevent them from "saving" themselves, and that cases are known where German artillerymen have been chained to their guns. In Germany, the government treats individuals as of no importance. They are like so many shells to be fired. Already, according to. calculations based on official reports, the Germans and Austrians have lost nearly two million dead. This death list is not the result of zeal on the part of individual soldiers. It is the result of the ruthless, mechanical, inhuman, though efficient, methods by which the German monarchy carries on the war. The Hohenzollern family must be kept in power, no matter how many plain German boys die to keep them there. I have often talked with German prisoners, and not infrequently have found they were glad to be free and out of the war, as soon as they had discovered that they would be treated humanely by the French.

I write very little about the work which occupies most of my time. Not only do I have continually to visit our sections, find out their needs and their troubles, interview the French officials of the armies to which they are attached and get their suggestions, try to correct mistakes and misunderstandings, etc., but back in Neuilly we have always new cars and new men to take care of, to get outfitted and to send out. We have now over one hundred and sixty cars on our rolls and more men than cars, and they are scattered all the way from the Channel to Alsace. To keep everything going smoothly means much attention to detail, but all of this would not be interesting to write about or to read.

Dear Mother and Father:

I am leaving on Sunday, the 27th, for the east. A French lieutenant has been attached to me as an orderly whom I shall see for the first time on the eastern trip.

No reply yet to America from Germany. How long will Wilson wait?

I am always well --- and happy in what I am trying to do --- though disconsolate about our government.

I wish you were here --- both of you. Love to you.

Dear Mother and Father:

I am once more on the grand tour, and just turning homewards to Paris after five days in "the field." We left Paris Sunday morning (June 27), after seeing our big Pierce-Arrow ambulance well on the way to Pont-à-Mousson and eight new Fords started on their way to St. Maurice.

When I got down that morning to the automobile bureau in Paris from which I get my passes, the captain in charge there explained that he had received word from the G.Q.G. (grand quartier général --- general headquarters --- everybody in the army alludes to the different branches and bureaus alphabetically) that an officer was to be attached to me. He apologized for not having a lieutenant available, but said he would give me a "maréchal de logis," which is, more or less, the equivalent of a sergeant in English. I was not sure, by any means, that I was pleased to have a strange and possibly uncongenial person tied to me, but there was no way out, and presently a tall, distinguished-looking soldier, who might have been a Russian general from his appearance, presented himself in broken English as my future aide. I expressed appropriately polite satisfaction, and asked him his name. He murmured four or five syllables which I could not catch, and I offered him my card (one of those with several rows of titles, such as they use over here in France) and he presented me his. It read, "Le Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre." So the duke now travels with us as my aide, and as he has proved congenial and companionable the arrangement works pleasantly enough. He looks after the passes, getting them viséed and prolonged and added to when necessary, and I am sure can save much bother. It demonstrates one time the more, however, how utterly democratic France is, that a duke belonging to one of the most famous families in France is naturally and willingly an under-officer in the French army. Such a thing would seldom happen, I suspect, in England.

Our first real stop was at Pont-à-Mousson, where we arrived quite late Sunday night. I found Salisbury (who had been advised by telephone from a neighboring town of our approach) awaiting us in the barracks, which are the office, garage, dining-room, and general club of the section, and he took us to his own quarters to sleep. As I have told you before, our men are quartered all around the town in private houses, sometimes in houses that have been utterly deserted by their usual occupants, sometimes in houses where one or two servants remain. This time I found Salisbury quartered in a luxuriously furnished house with a perfectly appointed bedroom, and we slept in very comfortable canopied beds with electric lights at the head, and in the morning, when the curtains were drawn back from the windows by the servant, we looked down on an adorable garden bright with flowers, and lawns and gravel walks, and a pool and stream, with peacocks wandering about. In fact, I was awakened early that morning by the peacocks. The booming of our cannon which were being fired from a neighboring wood was not disturbing, for I have long since grown accustomed to it, as one does to thunder, but the crowing of the peacocks was an unaccustomed sound and waked me very early. It seemed curious within eight hundred yards of the German trenches to find so comfortable a place, with roses and honey-suckle and geraniums blossoming in the gardens as if they had never heard of the war. The owner of the house has been away for months, but the servants live on, and care for things as usual.

All day Monday I was busy with arrangements for our section. I lunched with General Le Boc, who commands the division with which our section works, and who could not say enough about the efficient and devoted service which our men are rendering, and their courage in sharing so many of the hardships and dangers of the soldier's life. We had the usual champagne after lunch and toasts to the United States and the American volunteers and to France and the Victory. They all told me, over and over again, how dependable our men are, and how much they appreciate what we Americans are doing for them, and I had, as usual, to tell them how we regretted that we were represented at this great moment by men like Wilson and Bryan, and how we still hoped the time might come when the American Government would show officially that we as a people are not indifferent as to the outcome of this prodigious struggle.

I stayed over at Pont-à-Mousson all of Tuesday, too, and Tuesday afternoon I had two interesting experiences. I drove up on one of the ambulances to Auberge St. Pierre, a dressing-station in a brick house on the edge of Bois-le-Prêtre, perhaps five miles out of Pont-à-Mousson, and as at that moment there were no wounded ready to be taken back, and our batteries were firing from their shelters a quarter of a mile away, I walked down along the edge of the wood to where they were. They were firing four cannon (90-millimetre guns) at a time at some unseen battery on the other side of the forest., and the reports of where the shells hit were being telephoned back from some of our trenches on the other side near where our shells were landing. "A little to the left." "So many yards back," etc., the man would call from the telephone, and the artillerymen would readjust their range. Then, when the guns were charged and the fuses inserted, the signal was given, and with a roar four shells went whizzing off at imperceivable speed to an unseen destination two miles away. It is said to take about a thousand shells to kill a man; so if our fire was no more accurate than the German fire that afternoon, they had nothing to fear, for the Bôches' shells were not coming within half a mile of us.

Later I visited an aviation field., not far away, where I had met some of the aviators, and here I had the second experience of the day. B----- , one of the best of the French aviators, invited me to fly with him. We went up to a height of something over three thousand feet, from which we had a wonderful panorama of the war zone thereabouts. One could see at least twenty or twenty-five miles in every direction. We sailed over L----- and the surrounding forts, and then over some neighboring towns, with the earth below us like a carpet of finest pattern, of green and yellow, in which a ribbon of blue --- the river --- ran here and there like a slender serpent, with the trenches looking like broken nets of brownish string. B------ is a master in his profession, and there was no breeze; so when we were somewhat over three thousand feet in the air, he shut off the motor, and we did spirals and glided and soared like the gulls. It would have been a gorgeous experience anywhere, but here was the additional interest of looking down on a famous battleground.

On Wednesday (the 30th) we motored over to our tent hospital, which left Neuilly about a month ago, and which is now pitched at Pagny-sur-Meuse. This is an American field hospital purchased by American friends directly from the American Government. . . .

I have arranged to send half of our cars over to Belleville in the region of Pont-à-Mousson to work in connection with Salisbury's section.

Here in the Vosges Lawrence's section has undertaken a new and very important work. The region is mountainous, and no railroads cross or penetrate the mountains. The roads are narrow, steep, and crooked into sharp zigzags, and as everything used in carrying on the war in Alsace has to be transported by wagons or by horses and mules, the roads are crowded. To transport one 220-shell it takes a horse, and the distance from Bussang, the nearest railway base to Mittlach, in the valley of the Fecht, is about twenty-four miles. So there is one eternal procession of horses , cannon, wagons, and soldiers going over the mountains. There are no hospitals on the other side, and the poor fellows wounded in the battles about Metzeral have had to be brought over the mountains on mule litters or in springless wagons, a trip occupying four or five hours, with only the most simple dressings. Our cars have, within the past two weeks, undertaken the task of running up over these mountains, and being light and powerful have successfully accomplished it, reducing the trip for the wounded by three or four hours., and offering comparative comfort in a springed vehicle in place of what must have been a painful trip on mule-back or in a jolting lumber wagon. None of the French automobiles are able to make this trip, so we have really been rendering a precious and indispensable service in reducing suffering and saving lives. Last week we carried over a thousand wounded in this way, --- most of the work being done at night, a great achievement, considering the steep grade and the roughness of . the roads., and the necessity of making most of the journey without lights of any kind while passing interminable convoys.

On Thursday I went up over the mountains past Huss, the highest point of the crossing (four thousand feet above sea-level), from which the world opens up in a great panorama of mountain-tops, and then down again into the valley of the Fecht to Mittlach. While we were there some of the officers took us for a climb up one of the mountains called ------, from which we could survey the whole valley where the French have been fighting so furiously and so successfully during recent weeks. Every ridge is ferret-holed with trenches, and the once wooded tops are now only a tangle of splintered stumps. The wooded slope that we went up, however, was almost untouched, and was nested thick with dugouts and caverns filled with soldiers --- a veritable ant-hill of "blue devils," as the "chasseurs alpins" are called. Never have I heard such grand music as the roar of the shells as they tore down the air line of the valley, echoing and reverberating through the forest, until after perhaps ten seconds one heard the distant explosions as they fell near the German batteries not far from Munster, about eight miles away. At one point we came on an opening in the wood, where there was an artillery observation post, a low hut concealed by pine branches above and about the sides. One of the officers invited us in, and with glasses we watched the shells arriving down the valley and ploughing up clouds of dust. They were being fired from batteries a mile or so away, but the observer in the post watching their arrival would give his orders by telephone, "A little to the right"; "Not quite so far but in the same direction," etc., etc. At one time we saw three despatch riders (Bôches) on motor-cycles, flying down the road about three or four miles away, and our officers tried to hit them, and we could see the clouds of dust rising, first to the right, and then in front, and then behind them.. We could not hit them, but I venture to say they were well scared.

Down below us were the charred ruins of Metzeral, which the Germans had burned a few days before when forced to retreat. A mile or so beyond, a factory of some sort was going up in flame and smoke: the Germans were burning it lest it fall into French hands; and down at the head of the sunny valley we could plainly see the spires of Munster's churches rising above the red-tiled roofs of the city. Perhaps when this reaches you, France will have gained it, but I fear if she has, it will be only a mass of ruins, for the Germans burn everything when they retire.

On the top of the mountain we wandered for an hour among the trenches, which had only been deserted by the Germans a few days before --- ditches six and seven feet deep running everywhere, and lined with subterranean rooms covered with straw and littered with German papers, empty bottles, rusty bayonets, old knapsacks, packages of letters, torn overcoats and underclothes, empty shell cases, etc. I picked up a number of touching letters and postal cards written in German, and one German diary, which had been begun on August 1, 1914, the first day of mobilization, and which had been kept up until this June. The writer may be still living, but not improbably his body was one of the scores lying in unmarked graves. Everywhere, as one walked through the trenches, one saw white lime protruding from the fresh earth, only a foot or so deep, which French soldiers were pitching into the trenches to. cover the German bodies, and now and then one hurried past a nauseating odor where some body was still partly exposed.

It is curious how inured every one has become to death in its most brutal aspects. One thinks little more of passing a putrescent human body in a wood than one would, in ordinary times, of passing a dead dog or cat. It is unpleasant, and one hurries by, but one no longer has any sense of horror such as one would have had a year ago. Scenes that a year ago I could not have witnessed without being sick and feeling faint, I find myself now regarding with only a pathetic interest. They are inevitable, if melancholy, facts and so familiar as not to excite surprise.

Here and there, deep in the wood, one came on graves of German soldiers who had died before the French captured the hill, and their. graves had been marked by their comrades by crosses of fresh boards, covered with characteristically sentimental inscriptions, such as, "Unser unvergesslicher Freund," or, "Mag Ihr die Erde leicht sein," and at one place in the very heart of the wood was a fresh little burial-ground with a dozen or more crosses, some in German, some in French, where the soldiers of the two armies lay side by side.

There is so much always to tell about and so little time, as one experience runs close on the heels of another. Time passed very quickly up on Hill . We climbed in and out of the trenches, past groups of soldiers sprinkling disinfectants over human fragments, past batteries of our guns, past groups of singing "chasseurs," and always with the accompanying music of our guns firing at intervals of a minute or so. We forgot all about lunch. Some soldiers gave us a few slices of bread, and that was enough.

On the way back to St. Maurice, we watched a German bombardment of one of our mountain-tops, Hilsenfirst, I think it was called. One could see the flashes as the shrapnel burst in the air, and often four or five columns of dust when as many shells struck simultaneously, and then one would count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, before the reports of the explosions reached us.

On the way back from the east, we took a route somewhat more to the south than usual, and as we were rolling along on Friday evening, de Clermont-Tonnerre remarked that if I were willing to run a few miles off our course, he would be grateful, because he could see one of his houses that he had not seen since the mobilization, nearly a year ago, and that we could spend the night there, which we decided to do.

So about dusk we rolled through a pretty French town called Ancy-le-Franc, and then through heavy iron gates into a park bordered by century-old trees, and came on a tremendous thick-walled château of the time of Louis XIV. Only a caretaker and his family lived in it,. and the silence of its courtyard in the twilight and of the long alleys of trees that led away from it down mysterious, dreamlike vistas, contrasted sharply with what we had been experiencing the day before. We went through one room after another, with fine old fireplaces and heavy-beamed ceilings like those of Fenway Court, and in the candlelight we could see the pictures on the walls of François Premier, and Diane de Poitiers., and the duke's ancestors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who used to live there, the Clermonts, Tonnerres, Noailles, and other famous old names of pre-Republican France. The walls were fully ten or twelve feet thick, and there were everywhere panels in the walls which could be opened, and through which we passed into other rooms or into staircases. There was a lovely chapel with a balcony, and a room for the archives of the family, the walls of which were literally panelled with the crests of the different branches.

We had a mighty good dinner in a large tapestried room lighted only by candles, and the duke offered us some of his favorite wines. That night I slept in a damask-hung bed in a vaulted room, and from its walls looked down on me the portraits of men in armor and beautiful women, who three centuries or more ago had walked and laughed and loved and suffered within these same walls. Before I blew out the candle, I must admit that I wondered which of the panels in the walls were entrances from unseen passages, and what I would do if the wall opened during the night and some wraith walked across the room. But nothing happened. The only sounds were of the tinkling bells in the old clock on the roof of the château, and I slept as I had not slept for months.

In the morning, as I opened my window, I looked out on a decorative canal running down through a broad tree-bordered lawn to an artificial lake, and in the centre of the lake and at the head of the canal was an island, and on the island, almost lost in verdure, a picturesque little vine-covered villa of the time of Louis XV. It was called "La Folie," and was a play-place of one of the duke's ancestors.

We got back here Saturday afternoon and I found Harry Davison and his boy Trubee waiting for me at the hospital, and wanting me to dine with them.

Dear Mother and Father:

Yesterday, we celebrated the "Glorious Fourth," but alas, I must admit that I felt there was but little glory for us Americans to celebrate. The United States have had a great past, --- they are destined, I feel confident, to have a great future, --- but for the present I feel only a haunting sense of humiliation and regret. The only glory about the Fourth for me is the glory of France fighting the world's battles with indomitable courage and silent determination and without a murmur of complaint, although not properly supported by any of her allies. In all the wonderful history of this great nation, she has never given more convincing evidence of her real greatness.

In the morning we all went out to the grave of Lafayette. There was a group of our American ambulance volunteers in their khaki uniforms and a group of American volunteer soldiers from the Foreign Legion in the blue uniforms of France. With the French and American flags we marched through the cemetery to the tomb of the great Frenchman who spent so many years in the service of the United States during the grim years of our struggle for freedom. Here we were, --- a little group of Americans, --- trying in our turn to do our little for France in her desperate effort to throw off the yoke of her aggressors. But our Ambassador was our spokesman, and he spoke without imagination, without comprehension, without sympathy. It would have been easy for any intelligent man with a heart to recall in terms of living sympathy the, story of Lafayette and of the past friendship of France and the United States without in any way violating our present official neutrality. But Mr. Sharp was not the man to do so.

In the evening, there was a big American dinner at the Palais d'Orsay, with perhaps four hundred present. M. Viviani, the Prime Minister, spoke gracefully and eloquently, and M. Ribot and most of the other members of the Cabinet were seated at the speakers' table. Once more we had to listen to our Ambassador's ill-timed stories about Ohio politics, his rambling, inappropriate, undignified anecdotes and jokes. What a descent from the days when Franklin and Jefferson and Jay represented their country in France! Many Americans could not listen to him, but left the banquet hall and strolled in the foyer, until he had finished. It was hard for them to know when that had occurred, for he received little applause and that polite and perfunctory. Fortunately, another American, Professor Mark Baldwin, was listed to speak, and he happily expressed in a few well-turned phrases what we all felt. His every sentence was punctuated by tumultuous applause, applause louder and longer, because of the contrast with what had gone before. When he spoke of "questions and occasions about which no intelligent and high-minded man can afford to be neutral," the audience stood up and cheered, and cried, "Right," "True," " Bravo," and the gentleman from Elyria looked very grave, and Mr. Bacon, only a little way from him at the speakers' table, beamed with satisfaction.

Apropos of the Fourth of July and the sympathy of France and America, I want to append the telegram which the prefect of Nancy sent to our men in Pont-à-Mousson on our national holiday. It read as follows:

En ce jour où vous célébrez la fête de votre Indépendance Nationale, à l'heure même où dans de rudes combats la France défend son indépendance contre un ennemi dont la folie de domination menace la liberté de tous les peuples, et dont les procédés barbares menacent les conquêtes morales de la civilisation, je vous adresse l'expression des profondes sympathies françaises pour votre grande et généreuse nation, et je saisis cette occasion de vous présenter de nouvelles assurances de la gratitude émue des populations lorraines pour le dévouement admirable de tous les membres de l'Ambulance Américaine de Pont-à-Mousson.

I like, too, what the French papers of a few days ago quoted President Lawrence Lowell as saying at the Harvard commencement. It was something like this: "Our thoughts night and day are with those who are fighting on the other side of the sea. Each morning brings us terrible news of the many youths who will never wake again. They are doing their duty. They are sacrificing themselves that civilization may endure. To-morrow, perhaps, we shall be at their side in the trenches. But even to-day, we have our part in their war"; and to make sure that no one could misunderstand .to which side he referred, he added: "Who knows whether, among those thousands of martyrs, there is not another Louis Pasteur?" "The achievements of these heroes," he continued, "who are falling on the fields of battle, will be our heritage. It is for us that they are dying." If only Woodrow Wilson could realize the same truth!

Dear Mother and Father:

The other day, when I was in the abandoned trenches in the wooded hills above Metzeral in Alsace, I picked up a number of letters and postals among the débris left by the soldiers --- French and German --- in their dugouts and subterranean holes. Here are a few of them which may interest you. Here is also a German soldier's diary, begun August 1 last and coming down to June of this year, when he was probably killed; also a letter taken off a German soldier's body, pierced by a bullet-hole.

The enclosed letter, just received, from Ambassador Jusserand refers to a pine branch from Alsace that I sent him six weeks or so ago. The clipping about it which unexpectedly appeared in the "Intransigeant" the other day may also interest you.

Ambassade de la République Française aux États-Unis,
Washington, le 12 juin, 1915.

My dear Mr. Andrew:

I have been kept so extremely busy of late that I could not tell you at once, as I wanted, how deeply touched and moved we had been, both my wife and myself, by the unique, memorable, lovable gift which Mr. Charles Carroll brought to us from you.

The Alsatian branch of a pine tree is being framed and will appear in our Embassy as one of our most cherished souvenirs. Your card pasted on the side of it will ever remind us of how near a French heart an American heart can be.

When you have time, give us news of what is going on, and then news of yourself and of your work. Even if I answer you irregularly, it will be one more work of mercy for you to do so.

A new military attaché has just been sent me who was for months at the front in Flanders and elsewhere, so that I have from the military point of view, fresh news and impressions. They are, thank Heaven, of the most favorable description.

Believe me, with best regards and heartfelt thanks,

Very truly yours,

JUSSERAND.

Mme Jane Catulle Mendès est allée, on le sait, porter en Amérique la bonne parole française.

Elle était l'autre jour à l'ambassade de France à Washington, où elle avait demandé audience à M. Jusserand. Pendant qu'elle attendait dans un salon tout décoré d'admirables œeuvres d'art françaises, son attention fut attirée par une branche de sapin encore fraîche, ornée d'un ruban tri-colore, et d'où montait une forte et exquise odeur de sève. A l'un des rameaux de l'arbuste, une carte était attachée, on y pouvait lire:

"J'ai cueilli cette branche hier pour vous dans l'Alsace redevenue française pour toujours."

Et cette carte était signée: A. Piatt Andrew.

"Ainsi," nous écrit Mme Catulle Mendès qui nous conte cette émouvante anecdote, "je voyais pour la première fois, je touchais une branche d'arbre de l'Alsace française, et c'est en Amérique que cette émotion m'était réservée! Ai-je besoin de vous dire que mes yeux s'emplirent de larmes ......

Nous aimons à reposer notre esprit sur ce trait qui peint si éloquemment l'active et sensible amitié américaine pour la cause de la France et sa confiance dans notre victoire finale sur les barbares.

Dear Mother and Father:

I have been up again with our northern section --- my old section --- and am on my way back to Paris. Since my last visit Dunkirk has again been bombarded by the long-range guns, and the little city that was so thronged with people in the winter is now more deserted than ever. Most of the stores have their shutters drawn, or their windows, shattered by the concussion of near-by explosions, are boarded over. The majority of the civilians --- all, I presume, who could afford it ---have departed, and the town is no longer filled by the thousands of soldiers who enlivened its streets a few months ago. The beautiful old church of St. Eloi, where I used in January and February to go to the midday mass on Sunday, and which on those occasions used to be brilliant with the uniforms of soldiers, and where I used to enjoy the music and the peaceful atmosphere of the service, is now only a ruin, the Germans having succeeded in hitting it with two of their four hundred and twenty shells.

Perhaps a dozen buildings throughout the city have been destroyed. As a protection for the people the mayor has marked the available cellars on each block by red flags and painted signs, " Refuge en cas d'alerte." So, if the shells begin to arrive, one has only to run to the nearest red flag and there find a welcoming door leading to a cellar. This, however, offers no guarantee that one may not be buried alive under masses of débris.

The bombardments in Dunkirk are rather terrifying. The last one continued from three in the morning until six in the evening, shells dropping at irregular intervals of half an hour, or an hour, or sometimes oftener, in all about forty-six. They come from twenty-two miles away, and in their journey rise several miles in the air, so that to all intents and purposes these enormous projectiles, weighing a ton and a half and tall as a man, drop like meteors out of the sky. It appears that now the people in Dunkirk have considerable warning that a shell is on the way, for some one telephones from our trenches in the vicinity of the German lines to Dunkirk as the shell leaves, and at Dunkirk a siren whistles the warning, and then the people have nearly a minute to find shelter while the shell is on the way! ! ! You can imagine that it is rather exciting, for almost every day that the city is bombarded a dozen people are killed and others wounded. Yet many go on with their usual occupations. Madame Benoist d'Azy told me that on the day of the last bombardment, which began at 3 A.M., she remained in her bed until the usual hour, and then went about to the hospitals as on other days. She remains always cheerful, fearless, and gayly fatalistic. Our boys, too, did their work just as ordinarily that day, except that they had the added work of picking up the people killed and wounded in the streets. As soon as a shell arrived, our little cars were seen running through the town to find what they could do for those who might be hurt, quite regardless of the possible arrival of another shell in the same locality. Every one in the war zone becomes fatalistic about the hazards of war. "If I am going to be hit, I am going to be hit," one thinks, just as one thinks on the North Shore when the lightning is flashing on a summer afternoon.

I went on, too, to Coxyde and Nieuport where some of our boys are working. Nieuport presents still the strangest sight of my experience ---a whole city destroyed, not by fire, but by bombardment. Not a roof remains intact. The churches, the city hall, stores, schools, everything wrecked. Shells still drop here and there within the city every day, and not a civilian remains there, yet, curiously enough, there are still people living on the neighboring farms and the fields are cultivated. I lunched with Colonel Quinton, who is in charge of the artillery of this division, in the little farmhouse which is his headquarters, and he took me around among his batteries, which are well concealed among the sand dunes. One thing I saw yesterday which I had never seen before---a man-carrying kite. It was a windy day and the usual sausage balloons which they send up for observation purposes would not have been available. Instead, they had a series of box kites carrying a basket in which the observer sat. They tell me that the swinging of the observer in one of these baskets is most unpleasant

Around the church in Nieuport the graves have multiplied manyfold since I was last here, and as most of the soldiers here are "fusiliers marins" drawn from the sailorfolk of Brittany, where the cult of the dead is very highly developed, the graves have been decorated with everything that the town has to offer. There are graves framed in bedsteads, graves decorated with tiles from the floors of neighboring houses arranged in the form of a cross with borders, and every kind of vase and utensil has been used to hold flowers and plants, and all kinds of statues and bric-à-brac are carefully grouped about the head and foot of the graves.

It is hard for us now to look upon a devastated city like Nieuport, and to visualize the anguish that it represents, the thousands of women and children who have had to abandon their homes and their household treasures, of which nothing of value now remains, who trailed out on foot to neighboring towns with the little they could carry, like vagabonds, and who are now homeless and living on other people's charity, --- the thousands of youths who have been mangled and torn here and who have given their arms, or their legs, or their eyes, or their lives. One simply cannot realize that it is all real and not a spectacle. The reality flashes over you only for instants, and then you comprehend what a scourge to the human race the ambition of the Hohenzollern family has been.

I got back to Neuilly yesterday evening. To-day word came of trouble in our tent section --- a serious state of demoralization because of their inactivity. So they want me to start right off east, and I shall leave to-morrow.

With much love to you both. I have just got your letters of June 27 and 28, one enclosing a moss rose from my garden. How I should like to see that garden!

Dear Mother and Father:

Once more I am returning from the east. I have visited the sections at Pont-à-Mousson, Pagny, and in Alsace, and am now headed again for Paris, which we left on the morning of the 14th. As we left, an imposing cortège was conveying the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the composer of the immortal "Marseillaise," from the Arc de Triomphe, where the body had been lying in state, to the Invalides. Two great voices, from the Opera, a soprano and a tenor, with a great chorus and a military band, had stirred the thousands of listeners with that incomparable song, the words of which are so appropriate to this time when a great section of France is under the heel of a brutish invader. With the artillery marching between rows of glittering cavalry and aeros flitting like great bird guardians overhead, the procession was moving down the Champs Elysées as we left Paris. You will have read, long before this reaches you, President Poincaré's great speech, intended not merely for those who heard it, but for the soldiers and people of France and for the world, declaring the unshakable intention of the government to push the war to victory and to rid the world of the German peril, no matter what it may cost in men and money and no matter how long the struggle may last.

That night in Pont-à-Mousson, we were sitting in the twilight in the garden back of the barracks with our boys when some one said, "Listen." Once more we heard the "Marseillaise," this time sung by the soldiers in the trenches only half a mile away. No one spoke, but every one, I am sure, was moved as we heard the distant voices and recalled the words --- "Contre nous de la tyrannie l'étendard sanglant est levé"; then, "Aux armes, citoyens," "Marchons! Marchons!" and at the end that wonderfully tender verse beginning, "L'amour sacré de la patrie." And we thought how, that night, those same words and that wonderful martial song, the most stirring melody that ever was written, were being chanted along five hundred miles of battle-line by millions of French soldiers.

They had scarcely finished up in the wood on the hill when, "boom, boom, bur-rr- bub , bub, bub, bub, boom," rifles spluttered, grenades exploded, cannon barked, mitrailleuses trilled. An attack was under way, and we knew that up there men were cutting their way through the barbed wire, were charging at each other with bayonets, knives, rifles, and hand grenades, as they do night after night, and night after night. I got on one of the ambulances and went up to Clos Bois, a little villa on the edge of the wood which is used as a dressing-station, and sitting on the lee side of the villa as we waited for the wounded to be brought in, we listened to the roar of the cannon (one of our batteries of "soixante-quinze" was quite near), and now and then we heard the spent bullets hitting in the trees and bushes around us. That night our men carried in more than one hundred and fifty wounded, but it was only a small attack. On one day of last week our men had carried nine hundred and ninety-seven wounded --- and so it goes.

How one hopes that those who are responsible for this prodigious agony --- baffling all human power of comprehension --- will find their just punishment!

From Pont-à-Mousson I went on into Alsace. We have more than twenty ambulances there now, and the army administration has withdrawn the French ambulances, so we Americans alone are carrying all the wounded in Alsace.

Our boys are doing a wonderful work, climbing up over mountain passes which no other automobile ambulances have crossed before. At ---------I had tea with General Maud'huy, who planned the recent French offensive in Alsace, --- a charming gentleman, reputed a great officer. He knew all about our work and spoke very appreciatively of what our men were doing in Alsace. Of course, he asked about Wilson and the late lamented Bryan, and I was forced to tell him what I thought. All intelligent Frenchmen, like all intelligent Americans, are surprised that our government brooks the long delays and persistent evasions (not to mention the perjured testimony and false statements) of the German Government, but Frenchmen are too courteous to express their opinions freely. It goes without saying that they cannot respect our government, but they are profoundly grateful for our individual help and they only speak of that.

Dear Mother and Father:

The President's third (or is it the fourth?) Lusitania note,, which appeared to-day, is firm enough --- but what does it all amount to? The note last February was equally firm, when he said that he would hold the German Government "strictly accountable" for any American life or vessel lost through their submarine policy. In the Lusitania one hundred and twenty-nine lives were lost, and several American vessels have been sunk, and now, nearly six months after, he says that if any more lives are lost, he will consider it " unfriendly." . . .

Dear Mother and Father:

Once more I have been up in Belgium, and again we are homeward bound. The trip has been comparatively uneventful and quite without thrills. There is very little fighting in the north now, or for that matter anywhere along the line, and I begin to see the possibility of perhaps getting home for a fortnight before long. Although the papers periodically publish reports of a German concentration of troops in preparation for another effort to break through to Calais, these reports are generally discredited as from German sources intended to deceive. We saw two Taubes being attacked by land guns --- a sight which eight months ago would have been thrilling enough, but which to-day excites literally only momentary interest. You hear a mitrailleuse in the distance, and you see groups of soldiers looking up. Way up in the sky you see something that looks like a fly, and all about it puffs of white smoke from the exploding shells sent up by the mitrailleuse. You watch it for half a minute, and go on with whatever you are doing.

I found that Colonel Morier had moved our boys of the northern section, as indeed he promised me on my last visit that he would do, to a place in Belgium called Crombeke, where they will serve a region all by themselves, and where they can work in several different groups between the dressing-stations along the Yser Canal, and the field hospitals. As there is little happening just now in this region, they have very little to do, but they are excellently situated to get serious work as soon as things open up again. They are located on a farm, and living roughly as they might in a summer camp. They sleep either in the loft of a barn, or in their cars, or on the ground in an open field out of doors. I tried the latter alternative, and would have slept fairly well, except that the cows shortly after dawn were continuously trying to eat the straw under our blankets, and at intervals of a few minutes I was awakened by a bovine nose or hoof in near proximity to my head.

M. de Clermont-Tonnerre always accompanies me on my trips. He is an agreeable and well-informed companion and helps, through his wide acquaintance with people and customs, in many ways. Through him we also frequently find comfortable lodging and good repasts while en route. On the way up north, we stopped for lunch at a chateau at Achy, near Beauvais, where an aunt of his lives. It was a nice old place, with pretty vistas of woods and meadows and running water, the chateau a charming, homelike country place, built, I should suppose, in the eighteenth century, and now somewhat run down because of depleted fortunes. The old duchess, perhaps eighty years old, a spinster daughter, and an invalid son of about forty-five, live there alone. Another son is a colonel in the army, and they have not seen him for a year, but as we had seen him last week in Alsace, they were eager to know about him. "Did he look well?" "Was he thinner or heavier than he used to be?" "Had he aged much?" The duke was plied with questions.

Last September the Germans came very near to Achy, passing through on the road about a mile away. The daughter told me how her mother had refused to move at their approach, or even to allow the servants to pack their paintings and silver and objets d'art. She intended to meet the Germans at her door, and if she was to be turned out of her home by them, it should be by force. Fortunately, they never arrived. She had stayed in Paris during all of the siege of 1870, and, in fact, the frail, under-sized son, who still lives with her, was born there during those terrible days, and that was the reason for his not being strong.

On the way back from Dunkirk, I rode part of the way with Colonel Morier, who happened to be coming in his motor in the same direction., and we had an interesting talk. He has been a warm friend ever since I first arrived in Dunkirk last January, and I always stop for a moment at his office when passing through. From all accounts, he is leaving Dunkirk to become a general in some other part of the line, and he said "good-bye" as if for a long time.

I left him at St. Omer, and got into my own motor, and on the way back de Clermont-Tonnerre invited us to spend the night in his château at Glisolles, near Evroux, from which I am now writing. It is another beautiful country place, not as old or thick-walled or formidable as the one at Ancy-le-Franc, where we stayed a month ago, but much more homelike --- just a nice old eighteenth-century country home, with a fine old stone staircase, old furniture, and the walls covered with family portraits and old prints. The surrounding country is rolling, and from my window I look out over quite a panorama of wooded hills and steepled villages nestling among woods and meadows and yellow fields. It is all so dreamlike and charming and remote from war that I have taken a whole day off. This morning the duke and his two young daughters and Freeborn and I, accompanied by three Russian wolfhounds and an amusing pet monkey, made a pilgrimage to a lake down in a neighboring valley, and we took our bathing-suits and had a swim, and came back ravenously hungry to a lunch of delicious vegetables and fresh fruits. It seemed like a real summer holiday in America in times of peace.

To-morrow we are off again for Paris --- about two and a half hours from here. This is the harvest-time, and it is interesting, as we drive across the country, to see the women and children and old men driving reapers and heaping the sheaves of wheat. Yesterday I passed an old, white-haired, white-bearded man, with a feeble, white-haired woman, binding sheaves of wheat, and several times I have seen nuns working in the harvest fields. Every one in France is doing his or her share to keep things going and to help rid their country of the invaders. If only the days of miracles were not past and the swine could be driven into the sea!

P.S. Did you read Owen Wister's "Pentecost of Calamity" in the "Saturday Evening Post" for July 3? It is very good. I wish that German-Americans generally could read it. It is so devoid of prejudice against Germany and the Germans of other days.

Also do get and read "Ordeal by Battle," by Frederick Scott Oliver, --- author of the famous life of Alexander Hamilton, --- one of the best books on conditions in England before and during the war. It contains many lessons for us Americans on the need of preparing in time.

Dear Mother and Father:

Two fine long letters came from H. D. S. this week and four from you (the last dated July 21), all of which helped to make me happy. The mail always comes in a great batch on Tuesdays, and if I am in Paris on that day, I go down to Morgan-Harjes and devour everything greedily on the spot. Then, at night, when I get back to my little apartment, it is good to read it all over again at leisure.

I am sending to you by a friend who is going over to the States this week two rolls containing lithographed drawings of the war by various French artists, which, I think you will agree, are very fine both in execution and in conception. The sketches by Forain are particularly good, and I only wish that every one in America could see those referring to the Lusitania massacre. French artists are portraying the human aspect of the war with such tenderness and pathos as will perpetuate the sympathy of the world for France, and the abhorrence of the world for "Kultur" for generations to come. Most of their drawings (except in the very cheap journals) are touched rather with tenderness than with hate, but their very tenderness and reserve accentuate the grossness and brutality of a people whose schoolchildren are taught hymns and prayers of hate, and whose church bells gayly carolled the massacre of the twelve hundred innocent passengers on the Lusitania. I have been tempted to send to Woodrow Wilson a copy of the Forain drawing of the bodies of women and children washed up on the beach from the Lusitania. One poor bedraggled creature, still alive, is lifting herself from the midst of her dead compatriots and crying, "How our Wilson will avenge us!"

Little did she know "our Wilson"! If the picture really got beyond Tumulty's waste-basket and reached the President's hands, might it conceivably help him to see his own and America's ignominy as most of the rest of the world see it?

I lunched to-day at the Siegfried's with several men high in public life here in France, and over the cigars after luncheon, they asked the usual question: "Eh bien, Monsieur Andrew, what about the United States and your Mr. Wilson? " "And your Mr. Bryan, is he considered a great statesman?" "And your Ambassador, Mr. Sharp, what has been his diplomatic career?"

I love my country. I am proud of her past. I have great dreams for her future, but, somehow or other, I must confess it beyond my power to defend the policies of "our" Mr. Wilson, or the competence of men like "our" Mr. Bryan and "our" Mr. Sharp, whom he has chosen for positions of the highest responsibility. Jealous for my country and wanting always to defend her, I am unhappy, indeed, when I think of the rôle she has been forced into by her representatives in this the most crucial, transitional period of all the world's history.