That was the familiar device you wrote in the book you gave me when twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station. I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial _gassen_. You wanted me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed churches where we went to Mass at four o’clock of a Sunday morning, the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high, in the evening to drink your thin country vintage, and applaud the zither-players and the amazing Tyrolese dancers. When I was last in your Tyrol I did not see you, Franz: you had gone to Berlin to study philology, that characteristic pseudo-science which Nietzsche and your Prussians have transformed into a seed-bed of criminal philosophies. Those good days of our youth are worse than dead, a rivulet lost in the salt sea of estrangement that has engulfed so many friendships and so much happiness. We have other things to remember. Two years ago your Austria drove a sword into the heart of Europe. The agony of simple men then initiated still continues. I wonder where that damnable, recurrent date found you this midsummer? Fighting against that _Italia irredenta_ with which you used to sympathise so generously? Falling back before that Russia which you used to agree with me in regarding as the chosen home of great novels and profound religion? In the lines against France, that France which shaped and nourished the soul of every free soul in Teutondom--and they have not been many--from Heine to your own tragic Empress? There is another possibility which I had almost forgotten. No Man’s Land, or, as one had better call it, Dead Man’s Land, is no great width at the point we hold. Just as I am here swallowing chalk and clay, consorting with rats and lesser forms of obscene life, mixing with wounds and blood, so may you be over there. I look across the long grass, lush with disintegrating corpses, and imagine that Prussia may have laid hold of you for other pursuits than philology. Perhaps it is you whose machine-gun taps every night like a devil-ridden typewriter against this particular area of our parapet?