His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, and had been much shelled. The streets were full of children playing, blue soldiers were walking about, girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the streets, clicking their sabots in the mud. As we passed out the white sky darkened suddenly and a hard red began to burn in the west. We found ourselves nearing a half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed strangely between the battered, living village and the ghostly village of the Thirty Years’ War. It was of _grès rose_ and had been built on the foundations of an even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, high, red-roofed presbytery. For generations the church had been a shrine of St.-Blaise, and on every 3d of February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage made by those suffering from throat maladies. Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere of bootless desolation, and I was suddenly seized with an anxious feeling that I should be about the secret lonely business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and short, and “where was the place of eternal happiness, the place where the Barbarian need be feared no more?” ...[15] In front of the church had been placed, somewhat indiscreetly, the officers thought, a big battery. And the mayor said, too, apologetically, “_Evitément z’édait mal joizi par écard à l’éclise_,” for the battery had soon been sighted. After the church had received many shells right in her pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved some forty meters away, but even so it had again been _repérée_, and the church had suffered the usual fate of churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were left in the apse, of the delicious _grès rose_. For a moment Laferrière and I stood scaling off bits of the disfiguring gray plaster and wondering why it had ever been put on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone everywhere in Europe. The church, like the village of the Thirty Years’ War, will soon be but a name, for its walls are cracked and sagging, and with another winter’s frost they will crumble and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked over a mass of torn-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy modern stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, pointed windows. It was getting dark as we passed out into the disorderly cemetery, between the church and the battery (and even for a cemetery very uninviting, torn up as it was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were sticking out, shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once tidy family plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell-hole of only the day before.