I: “You are ready for anything.” He: “_Et comment!_” With a light in his straightforward _good_ soldier’s eye, and somewhat as a child longing for the impossible, “Just think of them in Paris, the restaurants full, _et des femmes sentant bon_!”[22] Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed lady proceeded to awaken the postmaster from his slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing accomplished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. In one of the _chanoinesse_ houses Captain Bernard also dwells. Sometimes he has headaches on account of his wound, and to-night he had left us early to go home. On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, “Perhaps he isn’t there” (Heaven knows there’s nowhere else to be but where one belongs, at Masevaux!), and it proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for after a while he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him saying: “What’s the matter? I was sleeping the sleep of the just.” “_Ça y est, l’armistice_,” some one cried out. Then that man, who had been through every campaign and would forever wear “Verdun” stamped on his brow, made no answer. And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too young to wait up, even for peace. We stumbled across the roughly paved square to my dwelling, and there we clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the woman and the American, wanted to say something, anything, but I had only begun, “_Mes chers amis_,” when I felt my voice break. I turned quickly and went in. What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night. _2 A.M._—Have been reading to quiet the heavily throbbing nerves. Picked out of the bookcase an hour ago _L’Histoire des Elèves de St.-Clément, Metz_, 1871. The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, confuse themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, with Belleau Woods, with St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. I remember being told that in a terraced cemetery at St.-Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend or foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each one by his grave, clad in horizon-blue, khaki—or field-gray, all those who at some word of command had left the “pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of existence,” and I whispered in great need of consolation, “I know that my Redeemer liveth and at the last day we shall rise.” _3 A.M._—And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, desired like the morning? I slept not that night of the 3d of August which held the whole war in its darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in “the grave’s quiet consummation,” shall I sleep? Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from a giant, near people in defeat, not knowing what new thing to will, casting off the old fidelities, which once had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones were shaking; “when _peoples_ rage, _kings_ must weep”; a world was to be remade out of empty places and blood.... I remembered how a poet[23] had cried out, as a prophet, after that other war: