For months she had been beloved by a handsome young _chasseur_ stationed with his regiment at Bitschwiller, one of many officers to frequent the hospitable house of the Gallands. His photograph on a table shows him tall, broad-shouldered, straight-eyed, kind-mouthed. On account of the uncertainties of his life he did not declare himself while there, but immediately afterward, doubtless because of some presentiment, he wrote to the mother telling of his love. This was found to be returned and they became fiancés. A few weeks after he was killed in Flanders, in one of the Mont Kemmel combats, a ball striking him in the forehead as he leaped from a trench to lead a counter-attack. He was one of ten sons. Six of his brothers had fallen, too. Awed, I asked concerning her who had borne them, but she had gone to her grave long before the World War; though I knew her not, thinking of the mother of the Maccabees, and many like her, I thanked God that those seven wounds had been spared a mother’s heart. Then we returned to the young girl’s story. “But never to have looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the glance of love,” I said, “it’s a shadowy and heavy grief for her youth to bear. Would it not have been better for them to have been united?” The mother answered, after a pause, “There was no time.” “But this can’t be the end for her; she’s only beginning life!” I said, and thought of the great, sorrowing hosts of these young widows of the heart alone, and of the vexed question in their families, as to whether it was better to become a widow or remain a maid. “She said to me only the other day, ‘I have all that I need for my whole life.’” “She will find that the heart is not like that,” I cried; “it doesn’t seem able to content itself even with the sweetest and holiest things of memory. It’s forever reaching out.” For a moment we stood with clasped hands, looking out to the hills whence despair had so often come, and Madame Galland added, quite simply, “Fifty thousand sleep around about us.” For one of the many-colored hills, pressing close to the broad windows of the salons, separated us from the Molkenrain and the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf. In the nearest, that rises without any perspective immediately from the house, is an old quarry, and it is there that since four years the workers in M. Galland’s factory are sheltered during the frequent bombardments of the town, for in what once was used for constructing spinning-machines eleven million shells have been turned out, all of which is quite well known to the enemy. The pleasant odor of the house followed us to the motor and even as we rolled swiftly down the valley of the Thur, past Moosch, against whose hill, still like a picture tilted back, lies the military cemetery, cut out of the rust and gold-colored hill, with its black splashes of pines. Again peace to those who lie there.