cancer of the throat. I suppose the old woman thinks
Guillaume is carrying all this war on in person. In a certain sense she
is not very far wrong.

For a whole week we got no explanation of that five minutes'
excitement. Then it leaked out that the officer of the General Staff,
who has been stationed at the Chateau de Conde, halfway between
here and Esbly, was about to change his section. He had, in the park
there, four German shells from the Marne battlefield, which had not
been exploded. He did not want to take them with him, and it was
equally dangerous to leave them in the park, so he decided to
explode them, and had not thought it necessary to warn anybody but
the railroad people.

It is a proof of how simple our life is that such an event made
conversation for weeks.

XXI

February 16, 1916

Well, we are beginning to get a little light--we foreigners--on our
situation. On February 2, I was ordered to present myself again at the
mairie. I obeyed the summons the next morning, and was told that
the military authorities were to provide all foreigners inside the zone
des armees, and all foreigners outside, who, for any reason, needed
to enter the zone, with what is called a "carnet d'etrangere," and that,
once I got that, I would have the privilege of asking for a permission
to circulate, but, until that document was ready, I must be content not
to leave my commune, nor to ask for any sort of a sauf-conduit.

I understand that this regulation applies even to the doctors and
infirmieres, and ambulance drivers of all the American units at work in
France. I naturally imagine that some temporary provision must be
made for them in the interim.

I had to make a formal petition for this famous carnet, and to furnish
the military authorities with two photographs--front view,--size and
form prescribed.

I looked at the mayor's secretary and asked him how the Old Scratch
--I said frankly diable--I was to get photographed when he had
forbidden me to leave my commune, and knew as well as I that there
was no photographer here.

Quite seriously he wrote me a special permit to go to Couilly where
there is a man who can photograph. He wrote on it that it was good
for one day, and the purpose of the trip "to be photographed by the
order of the mayor in order to get my carnet d'etrangere," and he
solemnly presented it to me, without the faintest suspicion that it was
humorous.

Between you and me, I did not