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 the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding. It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are passing. The headlights of our car flash on a continuous procession of motor-lorries, munition-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and peasants' carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive at Epernay for a lunch of red wine and war bread at the little station. By ten o'clock we are safely within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bombardment!

It is two days later before the French official communiqué in the daily papers begins again recording: "At Rheims toward six o'clock last night, after a violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans twice stormed our advance posts. But these two attempts completely failed under our machine-gun fire and grenade bombing."

It isn't what happens necessarily. It's what's always-going-to-happen that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists. Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives. Journalists must save their notes.

At half-past eleven o'clock that night of my return from Rheims, there is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from America: "Steamship St. Louis here. Your material from