Nature was singing to a different tune.

"It is strange, is it not," said our commandant, "this contrast between
war and peace? Those cherry trees comfort one's spirit."

He was a soldier in every fibre of his being, but behind those keen,
piercing eyes of his there was the sentiment of France stirred now by
the beauty through which we passed, in spite of war. We drove for a
mile or more down a long, straight road which was an avenue of
cherry trees. They made an archway of white blossom above our
heads, and the warm sun of the day drew out their perfume. Away on
either side of us the fields were streaked with long rays of brilliant
yellow where saffron grew as though the sun had split bars of molten
metal there, and below the hillside the pear-blossom and cherry-
blossom which bloomed in deserted orchards lay white and gleaming
like snow on the Swiss peaks in summer.

"Even war is less horrible now that the sun shines," said a French
officer.

The sky was cloudlessly blue, but as I gazed up into a patch of it,
where a winged machine flew high with a humming song, five tiny
white clouds appeared quite suddenly.

"They are shelling him," said the commandant. "Pretty close too."

Invisible in the winged machine was a French aviator, reconnoitring
the German lines away over Beausejour. Afterwards he became
visible, and I talked with him when he had landed in the aviation field,
where a number of aeroplanes stood ready for flight.

"They touched her three times," he said, pointing to his machine.
"You can see the holes where the shrapnel bullets pierced the metal
sheath."

He showed me how he worked his mitrailleuse, and then strolled
away to light a cigarette against the wind. He had done his morning
job, and had escaped death in the air by half an inch or so. But in the
afternoon he would go up again--2000 feet up above the German
guns--and thought no more of it than of just a simple duty with a little
sport to keep his spirits up.

"We are quite at home here," said one of the French officers, leading
the way through a boyau, or tunnel, to a row of underground
dwellings which had been burrowed out of the earth below a high
ridge overlooking the German positions opposite Perthes, Mesnil-lez-
Hurlus, and Beause-jour, where there had been some of the most
ferocious fighting in the war, so that the names of those places have
been written in blood upon the history of France.

"You see we have made ourselves as co