A soldier stationed with the Vitrimont detachment cranked the motor for us. His home was near by, and he told us with shining eyes that he had just bought for ninety francs two pigs. Somebody observed it was the _premier pig qui coûte_. However that may be, the purchase marked the remaking of his home. One is appalled at the time and energy and money necessary for the rebuilding of this single village—a million francs is the cost estimated—and materials and workmen are increasingly difficult to get. One thinks of the hundreds that _aren’t_ being rebuilt. Vitrimont has certainly been smiled on by heaven _and_ Mrs. C. As we drove home, fleecy, delicately tinted clouds were pinned together with mother-of-pearl cross-shaped brooches. It is in the air alone that there is any “war beauty.” Soldiers are passing under my window, some in the blue trench-helmets, with their equipment; some in their fatigue caps, swinging their arms, free of their eternal burdens; and there are officers afoot or on horseback, and colonials—marines, we call them—in many kinds of uniforms. The poster on the old garden wall opposite says: _Alice Raveau viendra jouer “Werther,” dimanche, le 17 juin, 1917, en matinée_. Charlotte might have lived in the house behind the wall on which it is pasted, a gray, smooth-façaded house with a good eighteenth-century door, and a chestnut and a linden in full bloom. At the café on the corner soldiers are sitting, laughing and talking, humming, drinking their _bocks_, reading their papers, or throwing words to women who pass by, and I thought of the men who pass through these villages, leaving to women an inexorable burden and an untransmittable joy. Many swallows are flying about, and above it all, in the colorful afternoon air, _avions_ are humming. On the wings of the French airplanes are stamped a great circle of color like an eye with red pupil, white retina, and a blue outer rim. After the hot day, something lovely and cool begins to come in at the window, and I know soldiers all over Lorraine are resting after the heat and burden of the day, though in the distance the dull, muffled sound of cannon continues. Now I must “dress”—that is, put on my other dress—for the eight-o’clock dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s. CHAPTER V MONSIEUR KELLER LUNÉVILLE, _Saturday, 16th June, 8 a.m._ As I put out my light and opened wide my window last night a rush of warm, linden-scented air came in, also the thick, soft, meridional voice of some soldier singing “_En passant par la Lorraine_.” I, too, was passing through Lorraine, and I got the sleep I didn’t get the night before. This morning more whirring of aeroplanes, but peaceful. The Taube got off yesterday; all the events of Friday were accompanied by that constant low-flying of aeroplanes, making one feel one was being looked after.