Very pleasant luncheon, after the accounting of the flesh, though not dallied over, as Captain Perdrizet, a man (Heaven reward him; I never can) of much _élan_ and quite a little perception of values, suggested changing my afternoon program, which was that of calling on various members of the high and comfortable bourgeoisie, whose “fleeting mansions” are known to me in many lands. When I found that, instead of basking in the comforts of this same bourgeoisie, eating their sweet and pleasant cakes, sitting in their deep armchairs, looking at the portraits of their ancestors, fingering their bric-à-brac and looking out at their view, I might, if the special commander of the special sector so willed it, make a pilgrimage to the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf, where fifty thousand sleep—and where others even then as we spoke were laying themselves down, my heart was greatly quickened and my soul, after its manner, began to burn. The sun was coming out between heavy showers as Captain Perdrizet and I departed hastily for Wesserling, where the permission was to be got. Now Wesserling rather deserves a page of its own, for many reasons, though, having a single thought—that of the pilgrimage—I gave but a glance at the very interesting little war-museum, stamped hastily on memory the quite delicious emplacement of the old château, now divided into various large and comfortable dwellings of the people on whom I was to call, and commanding the lovely valley to the west. Captain Perdrizet, who proved at every step to be a man of sequence as well as enthusiasm, took me straight to Commandant de Saint-Denis. After some conversation, which I politely didn’t catch, but which terminated by: “_Oui, si c’est comme ça_” (I looked perhaps more reasonable than I felt with that heat about my heart), “but I must telephone to the commandant of the sector at Camp Wagram, and from there you must proceed with an armed escort.” Gratefully, but with exceeding celerity, we shook the dust of the _Kommandantur_ from our feet, and returned through the valley as far as Willer, when we began to rise in a world of mist and breaking light, from time to time deluged by a diamond-like shower. Up, up through hills that one can no longer call changeless, for they are hills with their heads nicked off, neither branch nor leaf left on the stumps that outline their notched and shabby crests. Past batteries and gun-emplacements, embedded in wet foliage, many of them made by American troops last summer. Deep through a world of rusty beeches, with pine forests splashed like ink on near hills, here and there the torch of a larch—_mélèze_, it is called—and it is the only one of its family that grows yellow in autumn and sheds its foliage, and doubtless kind heaven made it so, that it might be a lamp in dark forests. There was the sound of rushing waters; and everywhere that beauty of moving, blue, helmeted figures afoot, on