It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled pine fragrance, with a continual looking back, where the billowing lightsome pink and yellow scarfs, woven of sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and more wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our motor’s _bougies_ got clogged with oil, and a thin, white fog, now opaque, now sun-shot, began to close in on us. We arranged the _bougies_, but there was nothing for human hands to do about that white fog, and we found ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly inclosed by it, and were seemingly alone on the heights, where the only thing that appeared to grow and thrive were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings of black crosses, with their tricolor badges, above wind-swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed graves, dug on these treeless heights. But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became conscious of the volatilization of the spirit, and knew those graves indeed for empty.... One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after the colonel who fell here, and looking like a mining-camp, the mist shifted, showing the jeweled, gossamer-clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and I saw its beauty no more—only brown seas of wire entanglements losing themselves in those shrouds of cottony white, which lifted here and there to show some detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There were dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings camouflaged in wood-colors and crisscross designs. In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking, all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to grins, and doubtless pleasantries in the best Gallic manner, at the appearance of the weaker sex on their grim, bare mountain-tops. We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented munition-depots, barely visible through thick layers of pine branches, and near them heads would be sticking out of what seemed mere holes in the earth. About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit had been considerably dampened by the closing in of that thick, cold fog, began also to fear we should be late for _déjeuner_ at Camp Wagram, from which, it appeared, we were separated by several valleys and a few hills of the eternal sort. The motor’s _bougies_ got clogged again (what part of its being they are I know not); the chauffeur got moody, Captain Perdrizet more visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic (he is a _littérateur_ when there’s no war, and has written a beautiful poem about Thann); as for myself, knowing strange and enkindling things were behind me, others doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would be interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time and circumstances, which for one of deadly punctuality is saying much.