Commandant Poulet having been called that morning to St.-Amarin, I am taken into a charming corner room hung with a wall-paper that might have been designed by Hansi, where a young, light-haired man with dark rings under his eyes, who knows both battles and desks, was sitting at a big table. We looked at each other, I must confess, with some curiosity, though of the politest. I, to see what the Military Mission might be going to offer, but prepared to be very easily and very much pleased, he, doubtless, to see what had been “wished on” them for the next week. It _might_ so easily have been awful, instead of a niceish lady who has both wept and laughed, and known many lands and many men. He asks me what I would like to do that morning. Not having the ghost of an idea what there is to do, I answer, “Everything is interesting,” and give a somewhat free Gallicization of “beauty lieth in the eye of the beholder.” This was received approvingly, even hopefully, and he tells me that in the afternoon I am to attend a ceremony in the military cemetery at Moosch, in another valley. [Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE] [Illustration: PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918] About this time I begin to remember that it is “La Toussaint,” and I say that if possible I should like to go to church. This, too, is encouragingly easy and I am turned over to an officer whose wife and two children have been in Brussels for four years, he himself a deserter from the German army. When we reached the church, built of _grès rose_, evidently and happily, from its abundance, the building stone of this colorful corner of the world, and which can take on the loveliest of _patines_ in even a generation or two, I find it overflowing with the faithful, many blue men standing on its pink steps. The curé, followed, I hope, by his flock, was off on a longish sermon, and for a good half-hour I was washed and blown about on a sea of mixed metaphor, though it did not seem too long, for mind and imagination were flinging themselves about reconquered lands and border peoples, and I only really “came to,” so to speak, when a great and splendid organ sounded and a deep, harmonious choir of men’s voices joined it. Then I knew I was indeed on the frontier, where music lingers, and amorously it would seem, near the last of the mad, Romantic peoples. When we passed out there was the noise of guns and everybody was looking up at little white balls of shrapnel unrolling themselves about some black specks in the blue, blue sky. It was the familiar firing on German airplanes.