All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France
we were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat and
smiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris,
and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thing
which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American
landscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day's
journey. In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading
the landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no private
automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all
automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons
of gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at the
two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons
of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills,
and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux
that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was a
million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up
from Bordeaux.

But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a
great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and
sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play
with us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with our
shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows
to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered
above us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her
crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough
from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and for
to see," the airplanes.

But the airplanes gave us the day's first opportunity to talk to