• It is not difficult to see that it was not these trips alone that made our training period at Chavigny almost a vacation. We had the best of officers. The two French lieutenants could not have been kinder to us or more interested in what we did.

• We had the quiet, pretty little farm where we lived ---there was a piano in the farmhouse, and the gardener's daughter entertained us evenings. We had Longpont with its eleventh-century gateway and the romantic ruins of its twelfth-century abbey.

• I wish that I could carry with me forever a picture of Chavigny as I have described it; but the God of War decreed that that was not to be. As the months advanced he shook his huge hulk, stepped forth, planted his foot on Chavigny, and in a twinkling the tranquil little spot was changed.

• Gone are the stables, with nothing but an elongated pile of stones to mark their previous existence. Where the animals were kept there remains but a boggy expanse of shell-holes, smashed helmets, and litter of war.

• One piece of wall of the château still stands; the rest is but a mass of crumpled masonry and broken beams. The branches are hacked from the trees as though a dull axe had been wielded against them. The trunks and stumps remaining are pierced or peppered by deadly machine-gun bullets.

• The field is a swamp, and, on almost the exact spot where once I lay and ruminated on the new-found beauty, stands a tank, leaning giddily, its side torn open, its ripped interior exposed.

• There is naught here but desolation. A cold, dank mist hovers over the spot from morn till night: and the crows flying back and forth seem to deride with their strident voices the work of man.

• FREDERICK W. KURTH*November, 1918

*Of Roxbury, Massachusetts; Harvard, '18; T.M.U. 537; subsequently Sergeant, First Class, U.S. Motor Transport Corps.