the sculptor has just pulled off the dripping sheet.  Lower down we came on more “trapper” settlements, so saturated and reeking with wet that they gave us a glimpse of what the winter months on the front must be.  No more cheerful polishing of fire-arms, hauling of faggots, chatting and smoking in sociable groups:  everybody had crept under the doubtful shelter of branches and tarpaulins; the whole army was back in its burrows.

August 17th.

Sunshine again for our arrival at Belfort.  The invincible city lies unpretentiously behind its green glacis and escutcheoned gates; but the guardian Lion under the Citadel—­well, the Lion is figuratively as well as literally a la hauteur. With the sunset flush on him, as he crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort, he might almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the Assarbanipal frieze.  One wondered a little, seeing whose work he was; but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the world from New York harbour.

From Belfort back into reconquered Alsace the road runs through a gentle landscape of fields and orchards.  We were bound for Dannemarie, one of the towns of the plain, and a centre of the new administration.  It is the usual “gros bourg” of Alsace, with comfortable old houses in espaliered gardens:  dull, well-to-do, contented; not in the least the kind of setting demanded by the patriotism which has to be fed on pictures of little girls singing the Marseillaise in Alsatian head-dresses and old men with operatic waistcoats tottering forward to kiss the flag.  What we saw at Dannemarie was less conspicuous to the eye but much more nourishing to the imagination.  The military and civil administrators had the kindness and patience to explain their work and show us something of its results; and the visit left one with the impression of a slow and quiet process of adaptation wisely planned and fruitfully carried out.  We did, in fact, hear the school-girls of Dannemarie sing the Marseillaise—­and the boys too—­but, what was far more interesting, we saw them studying under the direction of the teachers who had always had them in charge, and found that everywhere it had been the aim of the French officials to let the routine of the village policy go on undisturbed.  The German signs remain over the shop-fronts except where the shop-keepers have chosen to paint them out; as is happening more and more frequently.  When a functionary has to be replaced he is chosen from the same town or the same district, and even the personnel of the civil and military administration is mainly composed of officers and civilians of Alsatian stock.  The heads of both these departments, who accompanied us on our rounds, could talk to the children and old people in German as well as in their local dialect; and, as far as a passing observer could discern, it seemed as though everything had been done to reduce