Everywhere negro troops, sitting, standing, leaning, lying (a good deal of leaning and lying). An occasional forlorn-looking white officer. It is the same Fifteenth New York Infantry. “I am told they were all, before they were drafted, lift-boys and newsboys and bootblacks and railway-car porters,” said one of the officers. “You mustn’t class these last with the others. You don’t know the majesty and authority of the Pullman-car porter. He’s as final as the Germans think the Fourteen Points are,” I answered. I had felt myself somewhat exotic when I arrived in Masevaux; but I’m blotted into the landscape, one with Alsace, compared to these sons of Ham, clad in khaki, who fill the blue-and-gold valley of the Thur. Then we roll into the long street of the village of St.-Amarin, named after the saint to whom a saint friend said, upon seeing him about to make himself scarce at the approach of assassins, “_If you miss this opportunity for martyrdom, you may never get another!_” (It all depends on what you want and what your friends can do for you, and it isn’t a bit like politics.) But I’ll tell the story of St.-Amarin another time. The town that bears his name is long and rambling. There is a pink church tower surmounted by a slate-roofed top, shaped something like a turban with a point like those on helmets, and there is the fountain bearing the date 1830, and on its column is perched the Gallic cock, and it is the pride of the long street and vies with the church square as a meeting-place. But this is 1918 and the commandant, who loves St.-Amarin, as I can see by the gentle, almost affectionate way he looks about, shows me first the cinematograph, in a sort of club for soldiers. It has been a Mecca of warmth and comfort since three years for those coming down from frozen mountain-sides. Pictures by George Scott (good pictures) decorate it, and fancy is unbridled where the enemy is concerned. The Crown Prince is represented in a _loge_ with a voluptuous actress twice his size, and, furthermore, the artist, not content with mere paint and canvas, has given him real wooden legs which dangle from the painted sides of the painted _loge_. The Prince of —— said to an officer showing him about, “And even so you have flattered my cousin.” Franz Joseph, shrunken by years, is represented huddled up in another _loge_, with another actress, but it didn’t strike me as funny, nor did it recall in any way the tales of his very unspectacular friendship with the faithful Käthe Schratt. A little way down the street is the pleasant officers’ club, with books and papers, deep chairs and long divans. I dwell a little on the comfort of it all, thinking what it has meant to half or entirely frozen men coming down from those relentless winter heights. Then we go to the Bureaux de l’Administration across the way, which had been the headquarters of the “Mission Militaire d’Alsace” until it was transferred to Masevaux a year ago.