“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured (accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are _délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage, to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.” She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how. About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870 experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange, appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.