certain place close to
the German border. It was so close that in the inn a rifle-bullet from
across the border had bored a hole in the cafe mirror.

The car climbed steadily. The swollen rivers flowed far below us, and
then disappeared, and the slopes that fell away on one side of the road
and rose on the other became smothered under giant pines. Above us
they reached to the clouds, below us swept grandly across great
valleys. There was no sign of human habitation, not even the hut of
a charcoal-burner. Except for the road we might have been the first
explorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as far removed from the
France of cities, cultivated acres, stone bridges, and chateaux as Rip
Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The silence was the silence of the
ocean.

We halted at what might have been a lumberman's camp. There were cabins
of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke
poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam
and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe
to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years
old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan.

But from the lumber camp the colonel appeared, and with him in the lead
we started up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The freshly cut path
reached upward in short, zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored with
the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened
with stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The
soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is
the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to
an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at
least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They
towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was
hidden by the most exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the tree
trunks and covered the branches. They looked, as though to guard them
from the cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. Except for the
pink path we were in a world of green--green moss, green ferns, green
tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was
like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.

It was very beautiful, but was it war? We might have been in the
Adirondacks in the private camp of one of our men of millions. You
expected to