Troyon, October 8, 1918

I am writing this by the feeble light of a smelly bicycle lamp in a damp cellar under a ruined house somewhere near the front. By pulling a brick from my barricaded window, and with the aid of a little imagination, anyone can see the voie sacrée, the great Chaussée, the life line of Verdun which the Crown Prince and all his armies have failed to cut. My sergeant tells me the place is called Rottentout and he asserts that it is “rotten all through.” I have been here for four days and I am inclined to agree with him.

“All the folks were evacuated before we Americans arrived,” he explains, “and you can’t find the place on the map. Even the town major does not know its name, so we just call it ‘Rotten-all-through.’ ”

But we are not lost; our collection of ruined houses is a short mile from Troyon, the headquarters of the 26th or Yankee Division, the first National Guard division to see service on the fighting front and now forming a part, a very important part (we number over 30,000) of the French Army under General Dégoutté.

Difficult as it must be I shall try to explain the vicissitudes of fortune which I have suffered, I must admit gladly, during the last week. As I face the squalor of the humid cellar in which I live, more suitable for the cultivation of mushrooms than for human habitation, and view the sagging cot upon which I recline in my few hours of ease, it is hard to believe that I am the same soldier-diplomat who only a few days ago voiced the sentiments of America at the Congress of Submerged Nationalities¹ and lunched with M. Pichon in the stately precincts of the Quai d’Orsay, sipping rich wines and talking of our experiences in distant Peking in far-off Boxer days. But here goes:

Two days after M. Selves had adjourned the Congress without fixing a definite date for the renewal of our labors, I found myself continually wandering along the boulevards with uncertain step and certainly in a mental quandary. Right in front of the Café de la Paix, the scene of many important meetings that have so often shaped my life lines, I ran into Clarence Edwards, an old friend from the “days of the Empire” in the Philippines. Then he was aide to General Lawton, stood by his side indeed on that unlucky day when Lawton fell mortally wounded in a petty skirmish on the banks of the Pasig River. Now Edwards was a major general and had commanded a fighting division at the active front for a longer period than any of his brother officers. Strangely enough he had come across my name in a memorandum which we had drawn up at the War College a year ago explaining how we could best undermine the loyalty of troops with whom we might be confronted, men whose allegiance to the Central Empire could not be regarded as above suspicion.

“We have the plan in operation now,” explained Edwards. “Before me is an Austro-Hungarian division filled with Rumanians from Transylvania and a Prussian Landwehr division of second-line troops. We have editors from Cleveland and Detroit and one from Milwaukee, and whenever the opportunity presents, we bombard them with Mr. Wilson’s notes translated into their various lingoes. We were getting results, but last week the officer in charge of the unit died of pneumonia and confusion resulted. What are you doing here?”

I told him, and he did not think much of it—and, well, before I knew what was up, I found that I had agreed to take up the new job. That evening before he returned to the front Edwards arranged all the details; orders and travel orders were forthcoming, and it was agreed that Simpkins, his aide whom I knew, would drive me to Troy on and induct me into my new post.

Forty-eight hours later I was dining very simply but very well at my general’s headquarters and for that night at least I slept in his guest chamber which had so often lodged a marshal of France. It was only twenty-four hours later that I subsided into my cellar and got in touch with the propaganda machinery for which the general assigned me greater credit than I deserved.