The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own familiar graveyard, where his parents and his friends had been laid—though not to rest. He was out for the first time after grippe and he said, with a determined look and in his most creaking French, “If I have to die, all right, but I’ve forbidden my daughter to bury me here.” Many, many had also fallen in the fields, and everywhere thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists were beginning to rise and the copper-colored edge had hardened in the sky. I felt again an inexpressible discouragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only perceive the damp meadow, the demolished church, the gun-emplacements, the disorderly, shelled cemetery, and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incorruptible. We turned and went again along the dark, damp valley road till we reached the village with its consoling hum of life. Through the dusky street washed the lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some girls around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the half-light, built in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, though the mayor insisted on placing the Sons of Loyola in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and the fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far as he was concerned, came the war of 1914. He wanted us to come into his house to partake of some brand of white liqueur—as I have said the people of these valleys distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. It would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be used to this end, and no matter which of God’s colors go into their alembics, passing through, it comes out pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the stomachs of the populace—and little boys are born with the burden of deafness. Though twilight enveloped us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor’s face, and something a bit phosphorescent came into his eyes as he spoke of a _petite mirabelle_. Fortunately, it was too late to accept. A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened road to Masevaux, moving slowly, without lights, the road overlooking the Field of Lies, where the Germans watched. Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very long, very red, crescent moon. No one spoke. Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering upon what, when it was full and white, its light would shine. Now it was turned to blood. The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, transporting guns and supplies under cover of the deep, blue night. Once or twice on some hillside, turned away from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame, from the fire of a group of _artilleurs_, who were to wait the morning on wooded slopes.