I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn, yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part. I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging, escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course. Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon; and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest.... Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal stuff commingling with it. Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look into _l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine_, for one side of the Ballon slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine. As we threaded our way carefully through more _chicanes_ of barbed-wire defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes, outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their _cantine_ at Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one, Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said he’d been on the Mexican border. Then we told them where the _table d’orientation_ was, but forgot to point out the _chicanes_, and we saw them from a distance entangled in barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki clothes! And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale green.