We were running straight toward the trenches, through that green and gold and brown autumn world, the road screened by wire netting interwoven with pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of cloth screening, too, torn and flapping. The lines are but a few yards distant, and everywhere between us and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire. At St.-Léger an infantry band is playing the terrible, the gentle, the dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the superhuman “_Sambre et Meuse_,” which will forever evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to listen. A veteran of 1870 (no village seems to be complete without one or more) comes out, his green-and-yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives Lieutenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad women are grouped about the blue-clad band, under a great yellow chestnut tree. The mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchias_ of a passing Moroccan regiment give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And for a long way our road runs like this: [Illustration] We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits and deserted save for the troops, _Quatrième Zouaves mixtes_, they mostly are, quartered within their crumbling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camouflage hung across the streets, as electioneering signs would be hung, or the banners of festivities and welcome. Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the auto pass where for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went there they slipped silently behind the screens and under cover of night, with food and munitions or carrying wounded men. As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan of Arc and Madame Poincaré. Lieutenant Ditandy points out “_le Bec de Canard_,” the duck’s bill, a long tongue of Swiss territory that juts in comfortingly between the French and German lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody. On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois we pause; a few more turns of the wheel and we would be in full sight of the German lines. I make good my woman’s reputation for lack of sense of responsibility and beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, caps daring by a somewhat belated prudence (there is something bold and hard in his eye when it’s turned toward the enemy), saying: “We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return depends on whether a German officer sees us and, seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the mitrailleuses on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed near here—it would be too stupid to be the last.” Laferrière: “Not to speak of the incident it would create, and if the colonel sees us—well, the prison at Seppois isn’t inviting.” So we turned toward the Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly on her so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills enfolding her, the best loved of my heart.