But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books: “Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”? I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the _chicanes_ of the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine. We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs, and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the deepening crimson band of light. Later, a _panne_, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch, while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire. A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come. Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very strong, and long afterward the taste, the _arrière-goût_, remains in the mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said, “All the same, it doesn’t equal a good _quetsch_ or _kirsch_ or, above all, a good _mirabelle_.” And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this: