Now I see it as “No Man’s Land,” rusty and brown with patches of barbed wire, rough with great shell-holes, but they say that even in intervals of peace it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie about it.... A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above us. Very violent cannonading. “_C’est nous—c’est le Boche_,” Bernard repeats from time to time. Then his sharp eye distinguishes a group of German airplanes, and, looking where he points, I see five spots black, black in the white sky. They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my head the great swish made by the shells from the guns placed on a hill behind us—or so sounding. My ear is not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing hills. Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully wound balls of fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves about the black spots of the five airplanes, which, after a while, disappear to the east. Though not so overcome as the Niedecker’s Thierry, I feel that my eyes, too, have looked on a strange spectacle. Then Laferrière rejoins us. By the pleased look on his face we guess that he hasn’t made the wages of sin too high, and we continue on our way under the late, and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the heavily plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and black of the hillsides seem to disappear and the earth is green again, young and tenderly green, like spring, but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for on the slopes toward Thann there was again the autumnal gleam of gold and rust, and spots of fathomless black. Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who was to conduct us to the old Jesuit church, half-way between his village and the village of Otzwiller, or rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely during the Thirty Years’ War, wherein each lovely Alsatian valley had been sacked and burned and destroyed, and friends of yesterday were enemies of to-day, and _vice versa_. The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had conserved, during those many German years, a vast amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French.