_5 A.M._—Closed the book recording the deeds of those young, long, long fallen of St.-Clément’s school, and I pass to thinking how the word now on the lips of the world is freedom. But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for love which is never free, but always in bond to that which is its hope and its desire? And I cried out concerning freedom what once in the world’s greatest hour was cried out concerning truth, “What is it?” and begged that it might show its true form and aspect, above all to one who, invested with incredible power by a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings in his hand. More sabots click across the square, and a pale light sifts in at the top of the curtains. It’s the eighth day of Creation. Innumerable men have stood (and so near me) their last night through in the trenches.... Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand years ago. I had motored with Laferrière to lunch at Dannemarie across a rich plain, through Morzwiller, where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, and spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous fancies? Now, as then, the long street of Morzwiller was crowded with a highly colored, exotic regiment, and we were stopped a moment by a detachment passing. In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its yellowing grapevine clinging close and flat, a young officer in the strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchia_ of the Moroccans was getting off his horse, a blooded, white, long-tailed beast of Araby; on his breast was a blaze of decorations and there was something implacable in his young glance as he looked about, and something very straight in his mien—a man who had been at his enemy’s very throat, or drawn the sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his regiment, wearing also their crimson _checchias_, were sitting at a table drinking a light-yellow wine. A woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of the men sitting at the table. In another minute we had passed on. Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown stretches of barbed-wire entanglements, repeating the rusty tones of the beech forests which fringe them. I asked Laferrière what would become of those thousands upon thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He answered indifferently, as one does of things past, “Little by little the peasants will use the poles for their kitchen fires and the wire for their hedges.”