On our way home, not far out of the town, we come across a group of Americans and French colonials standing by the road. Lying on the embankment was a young man with a fractured skull, his face deathly pale, except for the contusions, already swollen and blue. His hair was matted with blood and his red _checchia_ lay in the ditch. The stern young officer of the many decorations (there were three rows of them) that I had seen descending at the inn at Morzwiller, was there, on his beautiful mare, and he held the halter of another very good beast, the one that had just unhorsed his rider. We got out and the young man was placed carefully in our motor to be taken to the hospital at Dannemarie, after which we started to walk back to Masevaux—about thirty kilometers. In war-time you don’t wonder “can you do it,” you just start out; sometimes you get there alive, sometimes you don’t. This turned out all right, for shortly after our motor, which had met an ambulance, came back for us. [Illustration: AMERICA AND ALSACE] And then we found ourselves passing through a sunset-world, cut by a bar of level light, so strangely thick where it touched the golden earth that it was almost like a ledge or a wall over which we looked into wind-still, purple forests, and above us, like the tarnished gilt ceiling of a temple, was the pale, amber sky. We talked somewhat of hope, somewhat of life, from which the red thing had so suddenly gone, as they alone can talk who have laid their heads close against the cruel, beautiful, full breast of war. As we drove into the Place du Chapitre a delicate white moon, seen through the nearly bare lindens, was hanging in a deepening sky, close above the soft, dark roofs of the houses of the _chanoinesses_. There was no breath of wind. No cannon sounded. One’s heart, too, I found, was very still. Millions of men waited face to face in dark lines, and that same moon touched their bayonets, their helmets, and their drinking-cups. The sun had set upon the last day of the World War.... The maid who brings my breakfast as I lie half dead, but not asleep, after the burning, consuming night, opens my blinds. French and American flags are flying from many windows. Something wets my eyes. Then—if in my flesh or out of it I know not—I see a strange brightness filling the Place du Chapitre, and a further glory bathes my being in such sweet and cooling waters that I again am strong to pass, with the Sons of Victory, into the New Day. In the old house are sounds of feet running to and fro. From our windows also blue and white and red flags are being hung. In the street are heard, “_Ça y est_,” and “_L’armistice est signé_.” XVI DIES GLORIÆ “_O Eastern Star! Peace, peace!_” And I arose and went to the church where there was a great ceremony, for it was the feast of St.-Martin, patron of Masevaux, as well as the end of the war....