In full maturity it has been given to Commandant Poulet to see results, and sometimes I have looked almost in and at a man whose strange lot during the war years has been constructive work. His first public appearance was when, as _tout jeune lieutenant remplissant des bouts de table_, he accompanied President Loubet to St. Petersburg on his 1902 visit. Since then many honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has been both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has planted and God _has_ given the increase. _Très chic_, in his horizon-blue, with his high decorations on his breast, _et très homme du monde_. This is what I see and it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know?—except that it must be as the life of all that walk the earth, disillusion succeeding illusion, grief tripping up joy; for there is no getting away from the old verses: _Ainsi du mal au bien,_ _De la joie à la peine_ _Passe la vie humaine._ Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a destroyed château. But he can always dwell in the dwelling of his labors in Alsace. Vis-à-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I saw on my arrival, always with deep rings under his eyes, too much in rooms and bending over desks—_il boit le travail_. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is musical, too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining-room for the mess to assemble we find him playing Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more compromising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster’s music on the Oberforster’s piano. _La musique n’a pas de patrie_—for musical men who have fought. (But let a zealous _civil_ far from the front hear a strain of Schumann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs straightway to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the Legion of Honor and the _Croix de Guerre_, and is so pale, I am told, because of the hard campaigns he has passed through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge in the absence of the commandant, but though _être Tirmannisé_ is one of the gentle jokes of the _popote_, no signs of tyranny were apparent to me. Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, from Lorraine, and had prepared himself for the Paris bar. He conducted himself admirably during the war, Laferrière tells me. Wounded three times, he bears a great scar—_sa belle cicatrice_, as his comrades proudly call it—on his forehead (Verdun, August, 1916) and over his heart _la Légion d’Honneur_ and the _Croix de Guerre_. Always very carefully dressed—_tiré à quatre épingles_ (pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are.