“It’s like a scene of opera, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. And then he proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, at an angle of forty-five degrees the wrong way, I wondering how on earth I was to get down, unless I fell. Then we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old, moss-grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through a long, subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, closet-like room of ageless masonry. Stationed at an opening are two men with telephones over their ears, binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of the opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this ⌓ and looks to the northeast, toward the Hartmann and the Sudel, and other consecrated heights, as well as the great, covered German plain—whose contours were more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had a feeling, crouching in the wet bushes the day before, gazing out on its wide splendors in shifting sun and shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon the little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut by the black line of the German trenches, running through the naked wilderness of branchless trees—though I had not known why. When we had blithely retraced our steps to the highroad, cracking many uncomplicated jokes, pleasing largely because we felt that kindness toward the universe so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing is going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping into them, two swearing, sweating, heavily laden _poilus_, who had got lost in the fog looking for their detachment. On seeing us they threw down their accoutrement on a wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at the unmistakable sounds, ran toward them, calling and gesticulating wildly. But, wiping their brows, they continued. They had taken the last step they were going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, and if they found their detachment or not they _enfiché’d_ themselves, only they didn’t use this elegant word to express their sentiments. The sergeant got more excited, and cried, “_Espèces de types_” and.... At this the commandant, foreseeing that the artillery exchange might get too loud for feminine ears, said to the biggest one (both were enormous), seeing his number: “You are looking for Camp Meudon, _mon ami_. It’s farther up; in an hour you are there. Follow the path up and always to the right.” On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move from that spot till the hill crumbled shouldered their accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in the best French manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared quickly, the strains of “Madelon” being loudly borne back to us on the fog. “_Ce sont des enfants_” (“They are children”), said the commandant, with his kind smile, “and _good_ children.” And that was the last word I heard concerning the war and “_les enfants de la Patrie_” on the Hartmann, for the hour of farewells had come.