We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinful-looking place, and while he is gone Bernard and I visit the old church, beautifully held in the cleft of the hill, lying against another hill, looking down on the plain of Cernay, toward the German lines. It is this same plain of Cernay, which I mentioned before, that was known in the old days as the “_Champ de Mensonges_.” There Ariovistus was defeated by Caæsar. There, too, Louis le Débonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed by his army, and ever since it has been justly known as the “Field of Lies.” Centuries later the Swedes vanquished the imperial armies there under a Duke of Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as “No Man’s Land,” brown with barbed-wire entanglements and rough with shell-holes—and other things besides. Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, the place of the century-old legend of the Niedecker’s young Thierry who, wandering there one night, saw strange sights. He had not drained a single glass of the _Rang de Thann_, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, called “_Sang des Turcs_,” but was dreaming, as an adolescent does, of everything and nothing, when suddenly the very stones of the valley began to move, and great fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thousands upon thousands of warriors of bygone times, striking against their shields and crying out in strange, hoarse voices, “_Hodeīdah! Hodeīdah!_” Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le Débonnaire, son of Charlemagne it was, his long, silvery hair surmounted by a gold and jeweled crown, jumped on a white horse and called by name, one after the other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, “Here.” Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke beseechingly the names of the sons he had begotten, Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin. But Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin mocked him and to further wound him caused to be brought on the battlefield his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken arms against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be put out (and for this the king knew little sleep). Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps up behind the king’s saddle, paralyzing his every movement. But at the very height of the combat, above its clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning sounds from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives again the ancient host and all is as before. Only Thierry from the Niedeckers lay as if dead. And the Field of Lies, _le Champ de Mensonges_, is said to be the spot where the children of earth will be assembled at the Day of Judgment, for what crime can equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered, imprisoned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only fault was that he loved them too well? It is even said that it is the troops of Louis who will sound the brazen trumps to awaken the dead for their last accounting.