A few harmless jokes about being at Meudon, yet, alas! so far from Paris, are exchanged, after which, followed by the armed escort, we mount through the wet, shabby forest to the very top of the Molkenrain. There crouching in some bushes we peer out through them to the Hartmannswillerkopf, that culminating, coveted point of the great plateau, where men have wrestled unto death these four years past. Brown, withered, not a tree on it left, its form is traversed only by a long black line—the German trenches. Behind and on each side of “Le Hartmann,” as it is called “for short,” is a great, misty, German plain; toward the left, in the extreme background, is the three-crested hill of the “Hohkoenigsberg”; great flamelike patches of cloud lay upon it, transmuting its stones and mortar into something gorgeous and unsubstantial. To our right and beyond stretched another great German plain, in front of which curtains of sun-shot cloud were falling and rising. One moment villages and fields and white ribbons of road shone, the next they would be blotted out by pillars of mist, and others came into view. “If they see us, they will fire,” warned the commandant as I made an involuntary movement to rise, when another quick diamond-like shower beat about us. “But isn’t it too dark?” I asked; that world of the Hartmann sector seemed so indistinct in shifting light and rain. “They’ve seen us when it was darker than this,” he answered, rather grimly, with the expression of one remembering lost men. Passing to another vantage-ground of the Molkenrain, whence we could see the Sudel, now entirely in French hands, we met a group of blue men, emerging beautifully out of the colored mist under the silver heaven. They were carrying hot soup to other blue men in the brown trenches of the Hartmann. Standing for no uncompleted emotions as far as the Hartmann is concerned, Captain Perdrizet stopped a glowing-eyed, red-cheeked, black-haired Meridional stripling and told him to let me have a taste from the can he was carrying. I drank, thinking “there are many ways of winning the war,” from a dipper for which a trusty, much-camouflaged hand had first to hunt in its steaming depths. As I thanked him I wondered within myself should I wish him a quick young death or a long life and a toothless old age? As will be seen I’m obsessed by the veterans. About this time Commandant Moreteaux said: “But Madame will only have seen the Hartmann in mist and rain. Why not come a second time and lunch with me to-morrow?” I looked at Captain Perdrizet, he at me, and both being, as I have said, mortals of “first movement,” and knowing holy enthusiasm, we accept—though I bethink me somewhat late of our chief, the commandant of the Military Mission, who marks the shining course of my Alsatian hours, and who might have other plans. It was “to see.”