What chiefly excited our curiosity, however, was the scarcity of German airplanes.  Although the days were clear and fine for observing, only occasionally did the barking of guns call us outside to behold a little white, shimmering object skipping defiantly through extremest blue while tufts of woolly cloud broke far below it, serving only to aid us in detecting the almost invisible plane.  One came over one night just about sunset, and called us and our dinner guests from the beginning of a meal.  Another paid us an early morning call.  Then for nearly three weeks we enjoyed undisturbed rest at night.  Not once did the “alerte” send us shivering to damp cellars; not once did we hear the deep “boom” followed by a savage jar and rattle which differentiates the falling bomb or torpedo from the cannon.  We said, fatuously, that we believed all the airplanes were engaged up on the English front, and that at last our mastery of the air must be firmly established.

[Sidenote:  News of the second offensive.]

[Sidenote:  The permissionaires return in good humor.]

It was on a Monday that the news of the second offensive reached us.  Trains from Paris were delayed and the Paris papers did not arrive, but the ambulance men told us there was a German offensive from Rheims to Soissons.  Next day the canteen was crowded with permissionaires hastily recalled from leave and hurrying to join their regiments at the front.  Most of them had passed through, ten to two days before, in the subdued good humor with which the poilu hails his bath, disinfecting, clean clothes, and relative security of body while on a ten days’ leave.  They were going back to face death, mutilation, and an experience which drives many men mad.  There was no undue hilarity about them, but a quiet determination which has been reflected in the stand made by the armies.  Here and there a weakling had tried to escape thought in drink, but the percentage of that sort was very small.

[Sidenote:  Three weeks’ respite of raids.]

On Tuesday more news drifted in, and that night I did not fully undress on going to bed.  So strongly can the sense of optimism be grown from little habit that a respite of three weeks from bombing attacks had almost (though not quite) convinced me there would never be any more.  I may explain that I was serving as canteen accountant, and occupied a tiny three-room apartment across the street from the canteen, between it and the railway station, and I took my meals at one of the two Red Cross houses maintained in E——.

[Sidenote:  Objective of a bomb attack.]

When a town is bombed, the Germans have various objectives, principally the railway stations, troop barracks, canteens, munition dumps, food stores, and hospitals.  As a rule, when private homes are destroyed, it is because they happen to be close to these points of attack.  Torpedoes are too expensive to be wasted in chance destruction.