Theirs was a smoking-set of imitation tin whose massive ash-receiver in the most horrid _art nouveau_ continually mocked the delicate spirals of smoke. Said the commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the dreadful thing: “That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could have bought an ash-receiver like it in every big shop in Paris.” “And in every little one,” finished Laferrière. “Thank God the frontier _is_ closed, even at the price.” In the corner between the windows was an upright piano piled with the best of music, and there was a large and completely uninteresting turned-wood clock, stopped at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago. And the man that earned and owned it all is dead in a soldier’s grave, and the woman, Anna by name, weeps somewhere her lost love and the equally lost gods of her household. _Et c’est la guerre._ [Illustration: COMMANDANT POULET] As for Madame Labonne’s cooking, she knows her business, and if it weren’t the obvious duty of those sitting about the table to take the gifts the gods and Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living much too well. She gives us a _gâteau à la crème_ that disappears smoothly, leaving but an exquisite memory. She has another _gâteau à l’oignon_ (don’t turn away; it’s perfectly delicious and takes a day to make the onion part), her _filets_ melt in the mouth, and her _purées_ are the insubstantial fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut decorated with boiled potatoes and shining pieces of melting pork, you don’t really need to eat for twenty-four hours, and wouldn’t go to the _popote_ except for the conversation and the company. Sometimes the officers, the unwedded ones, think of marrying Madame Labonne—she’s fat and about sixty and doesn’t try to look young (by her works alone they shall know her), and the married ones think of trying to introduce her into their happy homes in some rôle or other. And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian plain, that they have looked down upon these four long years, she is to take part in the triumphal procession. And this is how we generally find ourselves placed at table. I sit on the right of Commandant Poulet, who, somewhat as a prince of story, for these four years has administered with much calm, with great good sense, with wide understanding, and, above all, with immense tact and kindness, the not always simple affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered triangle. Only he can know the difficulties of the French Military Mission, though all may see the results. It is a land flowing with honey if not with milk (the busy bee in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would seem, not so the cow).