Over all a terrific boom of cannon was borne on the damp evening air. It seemed impossible to do other than walk magnetically on and on toward the dreadful sound, out of that world of surpassing beauty toward those supreme agonies, toward Mourmelon and Reims, where men were laying down their lives, even as we three women walked the fields at the sunset hour. I remembered suddenly a picture known and loved years ago—a woman kneeling by such a river-bank, her hair falling, her face buried in her hands, called “_Hymnus an die Schönheit_,” but over the pink-and-silver beauty of _my_ sunset world I heard the deep and dreadful tones of _their_ cannon, and the answer of the 75’s, which Joseph likened to the _miaulement d’un chat_—and all the world seemed askew, and I looked through tears at a golden half-moon that was rising in the pink to add an unbearable beauty to it all. IN MY ROOM, _10.30 p.m._ The cannon still booming. My room also has a dark-brown paper with great white flowers on it—some cross between peonies and dahlias, if such union is possible—and heavy mahogany furniture; a few books which I immediately investigated, on a gimp and tasseled trimmed shelf, for a clue to the one-time dwellers. Among them were two by Victor Tissot, _Le Pays des Milliards_ and _Les Prussiens en Allemagne_; the dates were 1873 and 1875, and they told of that other war; and I looked at Germany through the eyes of forty years ago as I turned the pages of _Le Pays des Milliards_, listening to the 1917 guns. History was not only repeating itself, but tripping itself up! Joseph is sleeping in the garden in the steamer-chair. I hear his gas-cough, a cross between a croupy cough and a whooping-cough. We wanted him to sleep inside, but he said “_J’étouffe_,” and took the steamer-chair out under the spreading chestnut-tree, and sleeps the sleep of youth, even though weary and gassed. _Thursday, 26th July, 1.30 p.m._ Sitting in the garden, after lunch, where we have had coffee under the spreading chestnut, ready to go to Bar-le-Duc. _Avions_ are whirring in the perfect blue, and we plainly hear the cannon. We are to take night shift at the little _Foyer des Alliés_. When I say that we carry nothing with us, not more than if we were going to take a stroll about town, one sees that the journey will be fairly elemental. Many white butterflies with an unerring instinct for beauty are flying in and out of the little white ash-tree. And in spite of the boom of cannon there straightway came to me a dear and fugitive realization that beauty is the first thing sought by instinct, its earliest and its last love, its imperishable means and its end. And how every other seeking of instinct comes after perpetuation, conservation, survival of the strong, and how it accompanies and pushes the soul toward its transfiguration.