of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk
with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to
Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the
stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole
in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have
weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it
clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but
a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up
on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk
French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four
minutes, we left town.

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden
only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven into
mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five
miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the
road indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our driver
tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour
and we skedaddled.

From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne,
a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharply
from the German lines and soon passes out of the German range and
the shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shell
holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley
as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows
and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the
earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they
gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with
colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the