drawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came
upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last
hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from
beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met
at my feet.

For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering
up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men.
To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of
Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls,
who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They
stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are
vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they
go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the
peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.

Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
visions.

Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
lit from beneath with evening.

I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
addressed myself.

It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
placard was f