As soon as I began to read the account of the destruction, I had a sudden illuminating realization of the meaning of something I saw from the car window the last time I came out from Paris.  Perhaps I did not tell you that I was up there for a few days the first of the month?

Of course you don’t need to be told that there has been a tremendous amount of work done on the eastern road all through the war.  Extra tracks have been laid all the way between Paris and Chelles, the outer line of defenses of the city—­and at the stations between Gagny and Chelles the sidings extend so far on the western side of the tracks as to almost reach out of sight.  For a long time the work was done by soldiers, but when I went up to Paris, four weeks ago, the work was being done by Annamites in their saffron-colored clothes and queer turbans, and I found the same little people cleaning the streets in Paris.  But the surprising thing was the work that was accomplished in the few days that I was in Paris.  I came back on March 13, and I was amazed to see all those miles and miles of sidings filled with trucks piled with wood, with great posts, with planks, with steel rails, and what looked the material to build a big city or two.  I did not wonder when I saw them that we could not get coal, or other necessities of life, but it was not until I read of the very German-like idea of defending one’s self on the property of other people that I realized what all that material meant, and that the Allies were prepared for even this tragic and Boche-like move.  I began to get little cards and letters back from the 118th on the twenty-third.  The first said simply: 

Dear Madame,

Here we are—­arrived last night just behind the line,—­with our eyes strained towards the front, ready to bound forward and join in the pursuit.

Of course I have seen the Americans—­a doctor from Schenectady and forty men, almost all youngsters in their early twenties.  In fact twenty-two seems to be the popular age.  There are boys from Harvard, boys from Yale, New England boys, Virginia boys, boys from Tennessee, from Kentucky, from Louisiana, and American boys from Oxford.  It is a first-line ambulance corps,—­the boys who drive their little Ford ambulances right down to the battlefields and receive the wounded from the brancardiers, and who have seen the worst of Verdun, and endured the privations and the cold with the army.

When a Virginia man told me that he had not taken cold this winter, and showed me his little tent on the common, where, from choice, he is still sleeping under canvas, because he “likes it,” I could easily believe him.  Do you know,—­it is absurd—­I have not had a cold this winter, either?  I, who used to have one tonsilitis per winter, two bronchitis, half a dozen colds in my head, and occasionally a mild specimen of grip.  This is some record when you consider that since my coal gave out in February we have had some pretty cold weather, and that I have only had imitation fires, which cheer the imagination by way of the eyes without warming the atmosphere.  I could fill a book with stories of “how I made fires in war time,” but I spare you because I have more interesting things to tell you.