The sergeant in charge of the machine-gun, taking advantage of a lull in the rifle-fire which had crackled and roared along the trenches since dawn, was sprawled on his back in the gun-pit, reading a magazine. What attracted my attention was its being an American magazine.

“Where did you learn to read English?” I asked him curiously.

“In America,” said he.

“What part?” said I.

“Schenectady,” he answered. “Was with the General Electric until the war began.”

“I’m from up-State myself,” I remarked. “My people live in Syracuse.”

“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and grasping my hand cordially. “I took you for an Englishman. From Syracuse, eh? Why, that makes us sort of neighbors, doesn’t it? We ought to have a drink on it. I suppose the Boches have plenty of beer over there,” waving his hand in the direction of the German trenches, of which I could catch a glimpse through a loophole, “but we haven’t anything here but water. I’ve got an idea, though! Back in the States, when they have those Old Home Week reunions, they always fire off an anvil or the town cannon. So what’s the matter with celebrating this reunion by letting the Boches have a few rounds from the machine-gun?”

Seating himself astride the bicycle saddle on the trail of the machine-gun, he swung the lean barrel of the wicked little weapon until it rested on the German trenches a hundred yards away. Then he slipped the end of a cartridge-carrier into the breech.

“Three rousing cheers for the U. S. A.!” he shouted, and pressed a button. Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip went the mitrailleuse, with the noise of a million mowing-machines. Flame spurted from its muzzle as water spurts from the nozzle of a fire-hose. The racket in the log-roofed gun-pit was ear-shattering. The blast of bullets spattered the German trenches, they pinged metallically against the steel plates set in the embrasures, they kicked up countless spurts of yellow earth. The sergeant stood up, grinning, and with a grimy handkerchief wiped from his face the powder stains and perspiration.

“If you should happen to be in Schenectady you might drop in at the General Electric plant and tell the boys—” he began, but the sentence was never finished, for just then a shell whined low above our heads and burst somewhere behind the trenches with the roar of an exploding powder-mill. We had disturbed the Germans’ afternoon siesta, and their batteries were showing their resentment.

“I think that perhaps I’d better be moving along,” said I hastily. “It’s getting on toward dinner time.”

“Well, s’long,” said he regretfully. “And say,” he called after me, “when you get back to little old New York would you mind dropping into the Knickerbocker and having a drink for me? And be sure and give my regards to Broadway.”

“I certainly will,” said I.

And that is how a Franco-American whose name I do not know, sergeant in a French line regiment whose number I may not mention, and I held an Old Home Week celebration of our own in the French trenches in Alsace. For all I know there may have been some other residents of central New York over in the German trenches. If so, they made no attempt to join our little reunion. Had they done so they would have received a very warm reception.

There were several reasons why I welcomed the opportunity offered me by the French General Staff to see the fighting in Alsace. In the first place a veil of secrecy had been thrown over the operations in that region, and the mysterious is always alluring. Secondly, most of the fighting that I have seen has been either in flat or only moderately hilly countries, and I was curious to see how warfare is conducted in a region as mountainous and as heavily forested as the Adirondacks or Oregon. Again, the Alsace sector is at the extreme southern end of that great battle-line, more than four hundred miles long, which stretches its unlovely length across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps, like some monstrous and deadly snake. And lastly, I wanted to see the retaking of that narrow strip of territory lying between the summit of the Vosges and the Rhine which for more than forty years has been mourned by France as one of her “lost provinces.”

This land of Alsace is, in many respects, the most beautiful that I have ever seen. Strung along the horizon, like sentinels wrapped in mantles of green, the peaks of the Vosges loom against the sky. On the slopes of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand forests of spruce and pine. Through peaceful valleys silver streams meander leisurely, and in the meadows which border them cattle stand knee-deep amid the lush green grass. The villages, their tortuous, cobble-paved streets lined on either side by dim arcades, and the old, old houses, with their turrets and balconies and steep-pitched pottery roofs, give you the feeling that they are not real, but that they are scenery on a stage, and this illusion is heightened by the men in their jaunty bérets and wooden sabots, and the women, whose huge black silk head-dresses accentuate the freshness of their complexions. It is at once a region of ruggedness and majesty and grandeur, of quaintness and simplicity and charm. As I motored through it, it was hard to make myself believe that death was abroad in so fair a land, and that over there, on the other side of those near-by hills, men were engaged in the business of wholesale slaughter. I was brought to an abrupt realization of it, however, as we were passing through the old gray town of Gérardmer. I heard a sudden outcry, and the streets, which a moment before had been a-bustle with the usual market-day crowd, were all at once deserted. The people dived into their houses as a woodchuck dives into its hole. The sentries on duty in front of the État-Major were staring upward. High in the sky, approaching with the speed of an express-train, was what looked like a great white seagull, but which, from the silver sheen of its armor-plated body, I knew to be a German Taube. “We’re in for another bombardment,” remarked an officer. “The German airmen have been visiting us every day of late.” As the aircraft swooped lower and nearer, a field-gun concealed on the wooded hillside above the town spoke sharply, and a moment later there appeared just below the Taube a sudden splotch of white, like one of those powder-puffs that women carry. From the opposite side of the town another antiaircraft gun began to bark defiance, until soon the aerial intruder was ringed about by wisps of fleecy smoke. At one time I counted as many as forty of them, looking like white tufts on a coverlet of turquoise blue. Things were getting too hot for the German, and with a beautiful sweep he swung about, and went sailing down the wind, content to wait until a more favorable opportunity should offer.

The inhabitants of these Alsatian towns have become so accustomed to visits from German airmen that they pay scarcely more attention to them than they do to thunderstorms, going indoors to avoid the bombs just as they go indoors to avoid the rain. I remarked, indeed, as I motored through the country, that nearly every town through which we passed showed evidences, either by shattered roofs or shrapnel-spattered walls, of aeroplane bombardment. Thus is the war brought home to those who, dwelling many miles from the line of battle, might naturally suppose themselves safe from harm. In those towns which are within range of the German guns the inhabitants are in double danger, yet the shops and schools are open, and the townspeople go about their business apparently wholly unmindful of the possibility that a shell may drop in on them at any moment. In St. Dié we stopped for lunch at the Hôtel Terminus, which is just opposite the railway-station. St. Dié is within easy range of the German guns—or was when I was there—and when the Germans had nothing better to do they shelled it, centring their fire, as is their custom, upon the railway-station, so as to interfere as much as possible with traffic and the movement of troops. The station and the adjacent buildings looked like cardboard boxes in which with a lead-pencil somebody had jabbed many ragged holes. The hotel, despite its upper floor having been wrecked by shell-fire only a few days previously, was open and doing business. Ranged upon the mantel of the dining-room was a row of German 77-millimetre shells, polished until you could see your face in them. “Where did you get those?” I asked the woman who kept the hotel. “Those are some German shells that fell in the garden during the last bombardment, and didn’t explode,” she answered carelessly. “I had them unloaded—the man who did it made an awful fuss about it, too—and I use them for hot-water bottles. Sometimes it gets pretty cold here at night, and it’s very comforting to have a nice hot shell in your bed.”

From St. Dié to Le Rudlin, where the road ends, is in the neighborhood of thirty miles, and we did it in not much over thirty minutes. We went so fast that the telegraph-poles looked like the palings in a picket fence, and we took the corners on two wheels—doubtless to save rubber. Of one thing I am quite certain: if I am killed in this war, it is not going to be by a shell or a bullet; it is going to be in a military motor-car. No cars save military ones are permitted on the roads in the zone of operations, and for the military cars no speed limits exist. As a result, the drivers tear through the country as though they were in the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Sometimes, of course, a wheel comes off, or they meet another vehicle when going round a corner at full speed—and the next morning there is a military funeral. To be the driver of a military car in the zone of operations is the joy-rider’s dream come true. The soldier who drove my car steered with one hand because he had to use the other to illustrate the stories of his exploits in the trenches. Despite the fact that we were on a mountain road, one side of which dropped away into nothingness, when he related the story of how he captured six Germans single-handed he took both hands off the wheel to tell about it. It would have made Barney Oldfield’s hair permanently pompadour.

At Le Rudlin, where there is an outpost of Alpine chasseurs, we left the car, and mounted mules for the ascent of the Hautes Chaumes, or High Moors, which crown the summit of the Vosges. Along this ridge ran the imaginary line which Bismarck made the boundary between Germany and France. Each mule was led by a soldier, whose short blue tunic, scarlet breeches, blue puttees, rakish blue béret, and rifle slung hunter-fashion across his back, made him look uncommonly like a Spanish brigand, while another soldier hung to the mule’s tail to keep him on the path, which is as narrow and slippery as the path of virtue. Have you ever ridden the trail which leads from the rim of the Grand Canyon down to the Colorado? Yes? Well, the trail which we took up to the Hautes Chaumes was in places like that, only more so. Yet over that and similar trails has passed an army of invasion, carrying with it, either on the backs of mules or on the backs of men, its guns, food, and ammunition, and sending back in like fashion its wounded. Reaching the summit, the trail debouched from the dense pine forest onto an open, wind-swept moor. Dotting the backbone of the ridge, far as the eye could see, ran a line of low stone boundary posts. On one side of each post was carved the letter F. On the other, the eastern face, was the letter D. Is it necessary to say that F stood for France and D for Deutschland? Squatting beside one of the posts was a French soldier busily engaged with hammer and chisel in cutting away the D. “It will not be needed again,” he explained, grinning.

Leaving the mules in the shelter of the wood, we proceeded across the open tableland which crowns the summit of the ridge on foot, for, being now within both sight and range of the German batteries, there seemed no object in attracting more attention to ourselves than was absolutely necessary. Half a mile or so beyond the boundary posts the plateau suddenly fell away in a sheer precipice, a thin screen of bushes bordering its brink. The topographical officer who had assumed the direction of the expedition at Le Rudlin motioned me to come forward. “Have a look,” said he, “but be careful not to show yourself or to shake the bushes, or the Boches may send us a shell.” Cautiously I peered through an opening in the branches. The mountain slope below me, almost at the foot of the cliff on which I stood, was scarred across by two great undulating yellow ridges. In places they were as much as a thousand yards apart, in others barely ten. I did not need to be told what they were. I knew. The ridge higher up the slope marked the line of the French trenches; the lower that of the German. From them came an incessant crackle and splutter which sounded like a forest fire. Sometimes it would die down until only an occasional shot would punctuate the mountain silence, and then, apparently without cause, it would rise into a clatter which sounded like an army of carpenters shingling a roof. In the forests on either side of us batteries were at work steadily, methodically, and, though we could not see the guns, the frequent fountains of earth thrown up along both lines of trenches by bursting shells showed how heavy was the bombardment that was in progress, and how accurate was both the French and German fire. We were watching what the official communiqué described the next day as the fighting on the Fecht very much as one would watch a football game from the upper row of seats in the Harvard stadium. Above the forest at our right swayed a French observation balloon, tugging impatiently at its rope, while the observer, glasses glued to his eyes, telephoned to the commander of the battery in the wood below him where his shells were hitting. Suddenly, from the French position just below me, there rose, high above the duotone of rifle and artillery fire, the shrill clatter of a quick-firer. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat it went, for all the world like one of those machines which they use for riveting steel girders. And, when you come to think about it, that is what it was doing: riveting the bonds which bind Alsace to France.

I have heard it said that the French army has been opposed, and in many instances betrayed, by the people whom they thought they were liberating from the German yoke, and that consequently the feeling of the French soldiers for the Alsatians is very bitter. This assertion is not true. I talked with a great many people during my stay in Alsace—with the maires of towns, with shopkeepers, with peasant farmers, and with village priests—and I found that they welcomed the French as wholeheartedly as a citizen who hears a burglar in his house welcomes a policeman. I saw old men and women who had dwelt in Alsace before the Germans came, and who had given up all hope of seeing the beloved tricolor flying again above Alsatian soil, standing at the doors of their cottages, with tears coursing down their cheeks, while the endless columns of soldiery in the familiar uniform tramped by. In the schoolhouses of Alsace I saw French soldiers patiently teaching children of French blood, who have been born under German rule and educated under German schoolmasters, the meaning of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” and that p-a-t-r-i-e spells France.

The change from Teutonic to Gallic rule is, however, by no means welcomed by all Alsatians. The Alsatians of to-day, remember, are not the Alsatians of 1870. It has been the consistent policy of the German Government to encourage and, where necessary, to assist German farmers to settle in Alsace, and as the years passed and the old hatred died down, these newcomers intermarried with the old French stock, so that to-day there are thousands of the younger generation in whose veins flow both French and German blood, and who scarcely know themselves to whom their allegiance belongs. As a result of this peculiar condition, both the French and German military authorities have to be constantly on their guard against treachery, for a woman bearing a French name may well be of German birth, while a man who speaks nothing but German may, nevertheless, be of pure French extraction. Hence spies, both French and German, abound. If the French Intelligence Department is well served, so is that of Germany. Peasants working in the fields, petty tradesmen in the towns, women of social position, and other women whose virtue is as easy as an old shoe, Germans dressed as priests, as hospital attendants, as Red Cross nurses, sometimes in French uniforms and travelling in motor-cars with all the necessary papers—all help to keep the German military authorities informed of what is going on behind the French lines. Sometimes they signal by means of lamps, or by raising and lowering the shade of a lighted room of some lonely farmhouse; sometimes by means of cunningly concealed telephone wires; occasionally by the fashion in which the family washing is arranged upon a line within range of German telescopes, innocent-looking red-flannel petticoats, blue-linen blouses, and white undergarments being used instead of signal-flags to spell out messages in code. A plough with a white or gray horse has more than once indicated the position of a French battery to the German airmen. The movements of a flock of sheep, driven by a spy disguised as a peasant, has sometimes given similar information. On one occasion three German officers in a motor-car managed to get right through the British lines in Flanders. Two of them were disguised as French officers, who were supposed to be bringing back the third as a prisoner, he being, of course, in German uniform. So clever and daring was their scheme that they succeeded in getting close to British headquarters before they were detected and captured. They are no cowards who do this sort of work. They know perfectly well what it means if they are caught: sunrise, a wall, and a firing-party.

From the Hautes Chaumes we descended by a very steep and perilous path to the Lac Noir, where a battalion of Alpine chasseurs had built a cantonment at which we spent the night. The Lac Noir, or Black Lake, occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, whose rocky sides are so smooth and steep that it looks like a gigantic washtub, in which a weary Hercules might wash the clothing of the world. There were in the neighborhood of a thousand chasseurs in camp on the shores of the Lac Noir when I was there, the chef de brigade having been, until the beginning of the war, military adviser to the President of China. The amazing democracy of the French army was illustrated by the fact that his second in command, Lieutenant-Colonel Messimy, was, until the change of cabinet which took place after the battle of the Marne, minister of war. The cantonment—“Black Lake City” Colonel Messimy jokingly called it—looked far more like a summer camp in the Adirondacks than a soldiers’ camp in Alsace. All the buildings were of logs, their roofs being covered with masses of green boughs to conceal them from inquisitive aeroplanes, and at the back of each hut, hollowed from the mountainside, was an underground shelter in which the men could take refuge in case of bombardment. Gravelled paths, sometimes bordered with flowers, wound amid the pine-trees; the officers’ quarters had broad verandas, with ingeniously made rustic furniture upon them; the mess-tables were set under leafy arbors; there was a swimming-raft and a diving-board, and a sort of rustic pavilion known as the “Casino,” where the men passed their spare hours in playing cards or danced to the music of a really excellent band. Over the doorway was a sign which read: “The music of the tambourine has been replaced by the music of the cannon.” Though the Lac Noir was, when I was there, within the French lines, it was within range of the German batteries, which shelled it almost daily. The slopes of the crater on which the cantonment was built are so steep, however, that the shells would miss the barracks altogether, dropping harmlessly in the middle of the little lake. The ensuing explosion would stun hundreds of fish, which would float upon the surface of the water, whereupon the soldiers would paddle out in a rickety flatboat and gather them in. In fact, a German bombardment came to mean that the chasseurs would have fish for dinner. This daily bombardment, which usually began just before sunset, the French called the “Evening Prayer.” The first shot was the signal for the band to take position on that shore of the lake which could not be reached by the German shells, and play the Marseillaise, a bit of irony which afforded huge amusement to the French and excessive irritation to the Germans.

When the history of the campaign in the Vosges comes to be written, a great many pages will have to be devoted to recounting the exploits of the chasseurs alpins. The “Blue Devils,” as the Germans have dubbed them, are the Highlanders of the French army, being recruited from the French slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Tough as rawhide, keen as razors, hard as nails, they are the ideal troops for mountain warfare. They wear a distinctive dark-blue uniform, and the béret, or cap, of the French Alps, a flat-topped, jaunty head-dress which is brother to the tam-o’-shanter. The frontier of Alsace, from a point opposite Strasbourg to a point opposite Mülhausen, follows the summit of the Vosges, and over this range, which in places is upward of four thousand feet in height, have poured the French armies of invasion. In the van of those armies have marched the chasseurs alpins, dragging their guns by hand up the almost sheer precipices, and dragging the gun-mules after them; advancing through forests so dense that they had to chop paths for the line regiments which followed them; carrying by storm the apparently impregnable positions held by the Germans; sleeping often without blankets and with the mercury hovering near zero on the heights which they had captured; taking their batteries into positions where it was believed no batteries could go; raining shells from those batteries upon the wooded slopes ahead, and, under cover of that fire, advancing, always advancing. Think of what it meant to get a great army over such a mountain range in the face of desperate opposition; think of the labor involved in transporting the enormous supplies of food, clothing, and ammunition required by that army; think of the sufferings of the wounded who had to be taken back across those mountains, many of them in the depths of winter, sometimes in litters, sometimes lashed to the backs of mules. The mule, whether from the Alps, the Pyrenees, or from Missouri, is playing a brave part in this mountain warfare, and whenever I saw one I felt like the motorist who, after his automobile had been hauled out of an apparently bottomless Southern bog by a negro who happened to be passing with a mule team, said to his son: “My boy, from now on always raise your hat to a mule.”

Just as the crimson disk of the sun peered cautiously over the crater’s rim, we bade good-by to our friends the chasseurs alpins, and turned the noses of our mules up the mountains. As we reached the summit of the range, the little French captain who was acting as our guide halted us with a gesture. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to where, far beyond the trench-scarred hillsides, a great, broad valley was swimming in the morning mists. There were green squares which I knew for meadow-lands, and yellow squares which were fields of ripening grain; here and there were clusters of white-walled, red-roofed houses, with ancient church-spires rising above them; and winding down the middle of the plain was a broad gray ribbon which turned to silver when the sun struck upon it.

“Look,” said the little captain again, and there was a break in his voice. “That is what we are fighting for. That is Alsace.”

Then I knew that I was looking upon what is, to every man of Gallic birth, the Promised Land; I knew that the great, dim bulk which loomed against the distant sky-line was the Black Forest; I knew that somewhere up that mysterious, alluring valley, Strasbourg sat on her hilltop, like an Andromeda waiting to be freed; and that the broad, silent-flowing river which I saw below me was none other than the Rhine.

And as I looked I recalled another scene, on another continent and beside another river, two years before. I was standing with a colored cavalry sergeant of the border patrol on the banks of the Rio Grande, and we were looking southward to where the mountains of Chihuahua rose, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim, against the evening sky. On the Mexican side of the river a battle was in progress.

“I suppose,” I remarked to my companion, “that you’ll be mighty glad when orders come to cross the border and clean things up over there in Mexico.”

“Mistah,” he answered earnestly, “we ain’t nevah gwine tuh cross dat bodah, but one of these yere days wese a gwine tuh pick dat bodah up an’ carry it right down to Panama.”

And that is what the French are doing in Alsace. They have not crossed the border, but they have picked the border up, and are carrying it right down to the banks of the Rhine.