“Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every land, when every dearest affection is accompanied by its related grief and every achievement by the phantom of its early hope—why this illimitable ardor of the soul, pressing us forward into new combinations?” ... A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the capital of that small triangle of Alsace, reconquered since the August of 1914, would be my journey’s term. Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the very end—on page four hundred and ninety, to be precise, and the book has but four hundred and ninety-nine pages in all—and it had seemed far, far, and the world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I have realized since that it was only the chill of the unknown into which I was to venture, drawn inevitably as steel to the magnet or the needle to the north, by that very ardor of the soul.... I had not slept at all the night before—I never do when I am to take an early train to pass out into new ways—and the somewhat dispiriting influences of “that little hour before dawn” were still with me as I stepped into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain of dragoons lifted my small leather valise and my not large Japanese straw basket to the rack. Settling myself, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat, slipped on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of officers and soldiers, as many Americans as French, perhaps even more. Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, with many decorations and a black band on his arm. He was carrying a small bouquet of what seemed like wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman in deepest black who would bear no more children.... Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying several pasteboard boxes, with three small children clinging to her skirts, hurried down the platform to get into a third-class compartment. But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki war was receding, its strange deeds, which had seemed cut in such high relief, were even then blurred against the red background, the background itself fading. “Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace” of the world horror, the world beauty, where sorrow has so often been above sorrow and where many “chariots have been burned to smoke.” ... In the compartment are five French officers with dark rings under their eyes. I don’t know whether it is wounds or the effects of the _perm_.[1] Anyway, they almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A young woman all in purple, whether third or fourth mourning I know not (it’s well done, though it couldn’t pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows and waggles a short-vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring compartment came classic expressions: “Can you beat it?” and “Search me.” My heart salutes the Stars and Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the very end of the guide-book.