Mules were brought, and we started on a long ride up the mountain.  The way led first over open ledges, with deep views into valleys blue with distance, then through miles of forest, first of beech and fir, and finally all of fir.  Above the road the wooded slopes rose interminably and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three or four hundred together, stabled under the trees, in stalls dug out of different levels of the slope.  Near by were shelters for the men, and perhaps at the next bend a village of “trappers’ huts,” as the officers call the log-cabins they build in this region.  These colonies are always bustling with life:  men busy cleaning their arms, hauling material for new cabins, washing or mending their clothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp-kitchen the two-handled pails full of steaming soup.  The kitchen is always in the most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at some distance in the rear.  Other soldiers, their job over, are lolling about in groups, smoking, gossiping or writing home, the “Soldiers’ Letter-pad” propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist laboriously driving the fountain pen received in hospital.  Some are leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Paris paper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own French journal—­the “Echo du Ravin,” the “Journal des Poilus,” or the “Diable Bleu”:  little papers ground out in purplish script on foolscap, and adorned with comic-sketches and a wealth of local humour.

Higher up, under a fir-belt, at the edge of a meadow, the officer who rode ahead signed to us to dismount and scramble after him.  We plunged under the trees, into what seemed a thicker thicket, and found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a battery.  The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gun hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom with his bride.

We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sun-and-wind-burnt common which forms the top of one of the highest mountains in the region.  The forest was left below us and only a belt of dwarf firs ran along the edge of the great grassy shoulder.  We dismounted, the mules were tethered among the trees, and our guide led us to an insignificant looking stone in the grass.  On one face of the stone was cut the letter F., on the other was a D.; we stood on what, till a year ago, was the boundary line between Republic and Empire.  Since then, in certain places, the line has been bent back a long way; but where we stood we were still under German guns, and we had to creep along in the shelter of the squat firs to reach the outlook on the edge of the plateau.  From there, under a sky of racing clouds, we saw outstretched below us the Promised Land of Alsace.  On one horizon, far off in the plain, gleamed the roofs and spires of Colmar, on the other rose the purplish heights beyond the Rhine.  Near by stood a ring of bare hills, those closest to us scarred by ridges of upheaved earth, as if giant moles had been zigzagging over them; and just under us, in a little green valley, lay the roofs of a peaceful village.  The earth-ridges and the peaceful village were still German; but the French positions went down the mountain, almost to the valley’s edge; and one dark peak on the right was already French.