Madame Galland, with powdered hair, slender, delicate of feature and of form, dressing older than she is, might have looked out of a Latour pastel. M. Galland, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful expression on her young face. It is a house from every one of whose many wide windows one saw gold leaves hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust-colored hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped with black patterns of pine. Within, the rooms were beautiful with blue-clad men. There was an agreeable and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about the house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the world, and the surety of those in authority, altogether a _good_ house. Eight or ten officers besides ourselves sat down to the usual delicious and abundant Alsatian luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have color, general enough not to exclude the stranger within the gates. And it ran after this way, beginning with accounts of that last day of July, 1914, when _Kriegsgefahrzustand_ had been proclaimed in the valley and they were completely cut off from the outer world, witnessing only the sinister passing and repassing of regiments of dragoons and detachments of artillery. M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vegetables possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of Bitschwiller in case of need, and collected what money he could. The days passed in suspense, till the 6th of August, when they remarked much coming and going of troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen beating a hasty retreat. A _Brigadier de Chasseurs_, mounted on a great black horse, is the first Frenchman they see, advancing alone, looking slowly about him, his revolver in his hands, fearing some snare. Then the _Pantalons Rouges_ pour into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every tunic, and the Gallands receive the first French general to enter Alsace since 1870, General Superbie, commanding the 41st Brigade. At two o’clock, after refreshments had been offered from every house, the regiment took the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of them had their “rendezvous with death.” The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called luck, and how the soldier must have it, be _chançard_, if he were to come through, and of generals who, like General Liautey, wouldn’t have under them any save notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless joking (with the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never say even within myself, “I _will_ do thus and so,” without adding “if God will,” remarked at last, propitiatingly, that “’twas somewhat difficult to tell _beforehand_ who was going to be lucky.”