At 2.30 I start out with Captain Tirman over a smooth road, _camouflé_, kilometer after kilometer, with screens of wire netting interwoven with broom and pine branches, for the road runs along the side of hills which slope down to the valley where the Germans lie intrenched. Everywhere are shell-holes, new and old. We stopped on a high place and, getting out, peered through a hole in the screen. Spread out before my eyes was the rich plain of Alsace, one of the world’s gardens. Something crystal and shimmering half veiled its loveliness, but its beauty and richness I knew for the beauty and the richness of a thousand years of blood, and many men had found it fair and panted for its beauty and died for it. In the distance, very white and shining, were the chimneys of Mulhouse, and a pale-blue line against the horizon was the Black Forest. All the time there was the sound of cannon, ours and theirs, reverberating through the hills. I was greatly moved, and started to go higher up in the field, but Captain Tirman stopped me, saying: “It will be better for you to get away with your souvenirs than to take them unrecorded with you to the grave. The Boches shell anything they see; and we haven’t got our masks, either, in case they send a gas-bomb.” The roadsides were planted with cherry trees, scarlet-leaved, the _kirschbaum_ of Alsace. The hills had great patches of velvety, rust-colored beeches; dark pines traced black patterns through them, yellow larches shone here and there like torches; a soft sun was dispersing the last of the delicate, noonday mists. Then we slipped into the valley of the Thur, where lies the ancient town of Thann. From afar I saw the lacy, gray belfry of its cathedral, pressed against other heights of velvet rust and burnished gold. Nearby, the hill of the Engelburg, with its broken, overturned tower like a great ring, a souvenir of Turenne’s campaign during the Thirty Years’ War, was soft and lovely, too. The long street was sun-bathed, and filled with the black-bowed peasants of story-books, and the blue soldiery of the great war. I wanted to stop by a pink fountain, near the richly carved portal of the cathedral, but we feared to be late for the ceremony at Moosch and hurried on. At a place called Bitschwiller, however, we were obliged to wait while an almost endless procession of black-clad old men, women, and children, and blue-clad soldiers wound across the road, from its pink church to the distant green and yellow cemetery. Furthermore, the Fifteenth New York Infantry—black, black, black—is quartered at Bitschwiller, and the most exotic sight I have ever seen were those khaki-clad negroes in that valley, already very high-colored. Suddenly against the steep hill, like a picture slightly tilted back, we came in sight of the square cemetery of Moosch.