er's lodge, we might have been on a walking tour in the Alps.
You expected at every turn to come upon a chalet like a Swiss clock, and
a patient cow and a young woman in a velvet bodice who would offer you
warm milk.

Instead, from overhead, there burst suddenly the barking of shrapnel,
and through an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French biplane pursued
by German shells. It was late in the afternoon, but the sun was still
shining and, entirely out of her turn, the moon also was shining. In the
blue sky she hung like a silver shield, and toward her, it seemed almost
to her level, rose the biplane.

She also was all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird,
she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into
flashing mirrors. Behind her the German shells burst in white puffs
of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of
ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with
them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves.
The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails,
tobogganed down vast imaginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the crests
of the waves, dived into a cloud and appeared again, her wings dripping,
glistening and radiant. As she turned and winged her way back to France
you felt no fear for her. She seemed beyond the power of man to harm,
something supreme, super-human--a sister to the sun and moon, the
princess royal of the air.

After you have been in the trenches it seems so selfish to be feasting
and drinking that you have no appetite for dinner.

But after a visit to the defenders of the forests of the Vosges you
cannot feel selfish. Visits to their trenches do not take away the
appetite. They increase it. The air they breathe tastes like brut
champagne, and gases cannot reach them. They sleep on pillows of pine
boughs. They look out only on what in nature is most beautiful. And
their surgeon told me there was not a single man on the sick-list. That
does not mean there are no killed or wounded. For even in the enchanted
forest there is no enchantment strong enough to ward off the death that
approaches crawling on the velvet moss, or hurtling through the
tree-tops.

War has no knowledge of sectors. It is just as hateful in the Vosges as
in Flanders, only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness with what is
beautiful. In Flanders death hides in a trench of mud like an open
grave. In the forest of the