we
beheld ambulance convoys hurrying in the same direction.

We could not be oblivious to certain signs which pointed to renewed
activity in our sector. The American ambulance boys predicted with the
emphasis and at the same time with the vagueness born of surmise instead
of exact knowledge, that we should "see something doing" in a few weeks.

[Sidenote: Few German airplanes.]

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