Above, in the perfect blue, the usual firing on German airplanes was going on. Long after the black specks had disappeared to the east the little, round, soft, compact balls of shrapnel were still slowly unfolding themselves. About fifteen hundred feet from us were the battle-lines, where the French and Germans have faced each other in the “Field of Lies” since 1914. One of the battered inns, “Zum Goldenen Lamm,” has its once lovely old sign still hanging out, but the golden lamb is gone, and only his golden feet and the green wreath of laurel that once entwined him remain. And to what winds had the dwellers of the great village been scattered? Where had they been received, unwillingly, by strangers, those hosts of refugees, fleeing from their homes, red with excitement, bright-eyed, voluble? I’ve seen them, too, after months of treading up another’s stairs and eating of the salt bread of charity—pale, silent, dispirited, returning to villages like Vieux Thann, to see their all among disorderly piles of fallen stones and crumbling mortar.... Back to the living city, to an increasing sound of cannon, but the Sabbath stillness was so deep nothing seemed really to disturb it. The cathedral with its single, finely pointed tower was like a needle everywhere threading up long streets. I had a desire to see it empty, and as I entered, its perfect proportions gave me a sweet and satisfying welcome. The red lamp of the sanctuary was now the only spot of color in the thick yellow gloom, out of which line and proportion gradually detached themselves. The celebrated choir-stalls had been removed to Sewen, but above the altar of the Virgin is a Gothic triptych, and the beautiful pulpit is of fifteenth-century wrought-iron. We groped our way into a low, vaulted chapel which existed even before the church was built, passing a tombstone bearing the arms of the house of Ferrette, a family once all-powerful in these valleys. Over the altar of the chapel is an ancient statue of Saint-Théobald. He has a long, thin, shaven, upper-class face, his eyes are bent, and he is looking perhaps as he did shortly before death found him in the Umbrian Valley. It is the visage of a man having done with personal things, and a great pity is woven into the downward curves of the benignant face.