morale in the army is that it is spotted. In civilian life the nearer
one gets to Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale seems
to be sound. These things we found in the air up near the front
line trenches, where German prisoners talk, and where one sees the
war "close up."

But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next
day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a
little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered,
and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and
go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The
railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a
big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into
the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town,
across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that
day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with
supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a
few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out
of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just
grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the
shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings!
Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed towns
for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the
bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles
at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding
breeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve
that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistband
from 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me that
we should first meet a German shell face to face in a place like
Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely