August 14th.

A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream running through it.  Pampas-grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths:  how bourgeois and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinel challenging our motor at the gate!

Before the door a collie dozing in the sun, and a group of staff-officers waiting for luncheon.  Indoors, a room with handsome tapestries, some good furniture and a table spread with the usual military maps and aeroplane-photographs.  At luncheon, the General, the chiefs of the staff—­a dozen in all—­an officer from the General Head-quarters.  The usual atmosphere of camaraderie, confidence, good-humour, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come to regard as characteristic of the men immersed in the actual facts of the war.  I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheon hours along the front...

August 15th.

This morning we set out for reconquered Alsace.  For reasons unexplained to the civilian this corner of old-new France has hitherto been inaccessible, even to highly placed French officials; and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road that led to it.

We slipped through a valley or two, passed some placid villages with vine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over the shops were German.  We had crossed the old frontier unawares, and were presently in the charming town of Massevaux.  It was the Feast of the Assumption, and mass was just over when we reached the square before the church.  The streets were full of holiday people, well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war.  Down the church-steps, guided by fond mammas, came little girls in white dresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in baskets slung over their shoulders, woolly lambs or blue and white Virgins.  Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in their Sunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we saw active preparations for a crowded mid-day dinner.  It was all as happy and parochial as a “Hansi” picture, and the fine old gabled houses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional setting for an Alsacian holiday.

At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and started out across the mountains in the direction of Thann.  The Vosges, at this season, are in their short midsummer beauty, rustling with streams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of firs and braken, and of purple thyme on hot banks.  We reached the top of a ridge, and, hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out into the open to lunch on a sunny slope.  Facing us across the valley was a tall conical hill clothed with forest.  That hill was Hartmannswillerkopf, the centre of a long contest in which the French have lately been victorious; and all about us stood other crests and ridges from which German guns still look down on the valley of Thann.