mountains of Attica. Here is Pentelicon, its deep purple cut into by the white quarries and by vivid patches of red, upturned soil; here, the slopes of Parnes, so lately devastated by fire, so rich when I last saw them in pines and plane trees, poplars and oaks and cypresses; and here, in a long line stretching north and south, lies Hymettus. When the sky is dull, its whole substance, with the stark rocks revealed, looks gray and cold and hard, and yet superbly modeled. When the sun is shining and the air is clear, dark purple shadows cover the mountain, marking out its folds and slightest ravines. And when there is a haze, a delicate veil of blue hides all the rocks and depressions, and modeling gives way to color. Sometimes wet clouds cling to the summit and creep down over the side in thin gray fog. There are dark days in Athens, when in embattled array clouds hang low over Hymettus, Pentelicon, and Parnes. Then it is not possible to discern beyond the Attic borders the god-haunted ridges of Citharon and Helicon.

The plain, where one is walking, is almost as barren as the Spartans left it in the Peloponnesian War. My friend tells me, with frank contempt, of Sophia's desire to cover it with fruit trees in German abundance and orderliness. At present only pink and white almond blossoms in the spring mingle with the gray-green olives, the black-green cypresses and yellow-green pines. In the winter the plane and beech trees carry pale gold leaves. When the winter passes wild flowers begin to appear. A rare green field is turned into shadowy blue by speedwell. Up on the Acropolis poppies and mallows, daisies and pale lilac dandelions creep out among the ruins. Anemones grow everywhere, sometimes close to clumps of asphodel. And on the sides of Parnes, among the rocks and rough shrubs, we used to pick

cowslips and crocuses and cyclamens. Only at well-watered Cephissia can nature become properly efficient, producing the vegetables and garden flowers which are sold in Athens.

Near the sophisticated Parisian city, in any direction, shepherds and their flocks abound. Often a woman, dressed in dull blue, leans against a tree and spins while she keeps an eye on her goats. One afternoon, accompanied by a friend, we followed a gray-haired old peasant as he was taking his donkey home from a day's marketing in Athens. He courteously accepted a cigarette from our man, and the two smoked and talked together along the highway. In his little village we found the streets peppered with children, and with women who gossiped at the corners as they plied the distaff or held the latest baby. The men were housing the sheep which had been pastured on Hymettus, and feeding the donkeys which had busily carried burdens all day long. One of the patient little beasts was rolling over and over, in an ecstasy of freedom, on a heap of straw in front of his master's hut. Every one wished us a ‘beautiful evening,' and every one in doing it wore a happy air, except one old, old woman whose face was too set in sorrow to change, as she bowed gravely and spoke the words with exquisite courtesy. From the outer corners of the village streets we could look toward the Gulf of Ægina; from the inner corners we could see the near foot-hills of Hymettus. We loitered in the primitive one-roomed tavern for the excellent Turkish coffee obtainable anywhere in Greece, and as we came out, just as we opened the door, we saw, across the plain, the Acropolis, silvery gray in the late gray afternoon, aloof and still, rapt from all commerce with our kind.

My last walk with my friend led us out from the southern side of the Acropolis. The clouds were gathering and

sinking upon Hymettus, a fresh wind blew from the sea. We made our way across the plain to a hillock which is the private burying-place of friends of my friend. The graves lie about a tiny chapel erected for prayers. We sat in its open porch and looked out beyond Piræus to the noble hills of Salamis. The gulf was very green. In our talk we drifted from Salamis to Shelley, from the war of independence to the modern political situation. Venizelos, the man from Crete, had just been elected prime minister. King George, respected and shrewd, was holding on to his throne, although his sons had been removed from the army. Constantine, the Crown Prince, in civilian clothes, and Sophia, unpanoplied, if unchastened, were appearing at lectures in the German archæological school and climbing the Acropolis with the rest of us to hear the great Dörpfeld expound the architecture of the Propylæa. How little we foresaw the events close upon us - the Balkan War, the recall of the royal princes to military commands, the assassination of George and the enthronement of Constantine as king and popular hero in one!

The wind grew cold and we rose and walked around to the side of the chapel from which we could see the Acropolis. I reminded my friend of the night of our youth, twenty years before, when we had sat in the moonlight on the steps of the Parthenon and she, the Athenian-born, had shocked me, the passionate pilgrim, by wishing she were in Florence.

"That was Wanderlust,' she answered, - we did not in those days avoid German phrases, 'not unlike your own which brought you here.' We talked of my imminent departure, and she wondered if I would ever return, as I had already twice before. 'But, of course!' I protested. 'It is a home of the spirit. How can I not come back?'

We turned homeward, walking toward that citadel which, as a Turkish commander told his Sultan in 1826, 'the nations of unbelievers regard as their own house.' After skirting the Dionysiac theatre, we turned into the broad street which runs by Hadrian's Gate, and came to my friend's door, passing in to charm and cheer.

Now this house like our common House on the rock above is in danger from forces set in motion by one nation of unbelievers which denies immortal Athens and seeks to resurrect dead Sparta. As the Spartans laid waste the Attic plain, are these Germans laying waste the Athenian spirit? Are they making void the liberty and humanity handed down by the ancient democracy to a people which wrestled with the Turk and demanded constitutional rights from its first king?

In the beauty of the Attic plain there is an extraordinary spiritual power. Those who dwell with it often wonder whether this unique quality comes from the pervading restraint in color and form, from the strength of the hills, or from the presence, from street-corners and fields and mountain-tops, of the height which bears the temple of Wisdom. The first time I climbed up the Acropolis it was in the company of a German. I regretted my ignorance of much that lay around me and he said to me, 'Do not be troubled because you do not yet know about these things. Love them first. The rest will follow.' He died long ago, but there must be many left in his country who will not forever submit to Sparta. St. Paul, with a superb disregard for nationalism, talked of a spiritual commonwealth. Its citizens we must assure ourselves

will yet join in what Paul's Athenian forerunner described as a 'recall of the noblest in the soul to a vision of the most excellent in the ideal.'

It is incredible that some day, in the

spring, when new-born flowers are creeping out among the ruins, I should not return to Greece. My bitter anger gives way to the passionate hope that I may then be willing again to ascend the steeps of the Acropolis with a German. As I look down from there upon Mars'

Hill, where the Christian declared the Unknown God, - Him who is not far from every one of us and who hath made of one blood all nations of men, -I am emboldened to hope that my friend herself may receive us together in her house in Athens.

I

JANUARY 7, 1915, will remain a memorable date for me. It was the day when I was unfortunate enough to be captured by the Germans. A short description will show how it happened.

The company of which I was in command had to defend a front of about a thousand feet in the very heart of the Argonne, that is, eighteen odd miles west-northwest of Verdun. Trench warfare had set in over two months before, and deep trenches had been dug in the first line, while a second line was in course of completion about four hundred feet behind the first. They were connected by communication trenches which wound round the short stumps of oaks decapitated by shells. My company front was pretty secure, for my first line, manned by one half of my soldiers, was running along the northern brow of a small plateau which dipped clean down under our very parapets to make way for a small forest brook running parallel to my trench eighty feet below. The ground rose again as steeply on the other bank, the German position lying exactly opposite

ours, and on about the same level. There was no more idea of our making a frontal attack on the Germans than there was danger that they would disturb us seriously. But conditions were quite different on the right and left continuation of my trench, respectively held by the 7th and the 1st companies of my regiment. For there the slope toward the Germans was gentle and slow, and the 'debatable land' between the Germans and the first company amounted to a strip hardly 30 feet in depth, sometimes less. So that I was running the risk of having the Germans in the same trench with me on either of my flanks if they attacked the neighboring companies of the 46th, as was bound to happen sooner or later.

For there was no quiet in the Argonne throughout the winter of 19141915. There were no big-scale attacks, but plenty of trenches stormed and restormed: the German Crown Prince, who was in command of the army facing us, evidently tried to drive us gradually back till he got nearer to Verdun from the northwest. These attacks were to culminate in the well-known German partial offensive of July 13

and 14, 1915, which had some success at the beginning, but meant no serious advance; so that the lines in early 1917 are nearly the same as in early 1915.

On the 7th of January, 1915, about 8 A.M., we heard quite an unusual number of German shells gliding with a railway-like rumbling high above our heads (this is a pet metaphor of many poilus who have no idea what a metaphor is), and crashing a couple of hundred yards behind us. Did that mean that the Germans were up to something? It probably did, for after half an hour, as I was washing up out of a pail of water held for me by my orderly, a deafening report rose on my left, apparently very close. The pail drops on my feet and all the trench shakes and shivers as in a formidable earthquake. A most uncomfortable feeling. The Germans had presumably sprung a mine and were attacking on my left. All at once the sniping developed into regular gusts of musketry-fire. In a few seconds I had pulled my revolver, which I never abandoned, out of its case, and was rushing to the extreme left of my company front, which I well knew was for the moment the only endangered part, taking on my way a few men with me as a reinforcement.

Yells to the left! The Germans have jumped into the trench of the 1st Company, I hear from a few soldiers of that company, who are drawing back my way. I establish myself immediately, with my sergeant-major, behind a traverse,-pare-éclats (protection against splinters) as we call them,—and stand waiting there, revolver in hand, ready to fire on the first German whom I see. Suddenly, one yard off, the muzzle of a rifle faces me, and a feldgrau breast behind it. I fire from my concealed angle, something heavy splashes in the mud. Not five seconds have elapsed, as far as I can make out, when I feel a whirl and a hubbub in my head, and I myself am

lying wounded in the mud, looking in vain for my revolver.

The retribution had been quick. Two Germans rush at me, wildly excited, yelling like mad, and shouting in bad French, ‘Rendez-fous!' One of them takes a bad aim at me and pulls the trigger of his Mauser. The bullet hits the parapet, but not me, and I answer in the best German that I can muster, in a voice of command, Nicht schiessen! Ich bin ein verwundeter Oberleutnant! Lassen Sie mal einen Sanitäter herkommen.'-'Zu Befehl! Herr Oberleutnant.' And the same man who tried to kill me half a minute before pulls me gently back to the now German side of the traverse and watches me good-humoredly, while his chum goes for a Red Cross orderly. I cannot move; I do not know where my limbs are, but my head is now a little clearer and I ask myself what has happened.

This is what has happened: the Germans had hand-bombs while we had not a single one, and they had very skillfully hurled one at me, over the traverse. It burst so near me on my left, that my left tympanum was broken under the pressure of air, while I got a rich allotment of splinters in my head above my left ear, in my left hand, in my breast, in my left thigh, and in my left and right calves. Képi and revolver had been flung away by the force of the explosion and were lying somewhere in the mud or over the parapet. And now I am lying on my back in thick Argonne mire, tinged red by my blood, and I look at the clouds scudding madly overhead, and it seems so funny to see all that reversed landscape, all those reversed trees which I used to know so well, every single one of them, but do not quite recognize now because I am gazing at them from a lying instead of a standing position. I felt just weak, so weak that I could not raise my head from the pillow of stone kindly

provided by my would-be murderer. I had no notion of time, did not feel unhappy, did not quite know whether I was going to die or not, did not much care; I took it as a matter of course to see the Germans firing at the French on both sides of me, and now and again casting a side glance at me. I think I did not even fully realize that I was a prisoner-did not resent it anyhow, as I was to do later. In short, I suffered neither physically nor morally, stripped as I apparently was of the very faculty of feeling.

How long I waited under the rain, on my soft bed of earth, watching all the time with keen interest a streamlet of clayey water playing along my breast and thigh, till it grew light pink, then crimson, and finally doubled the cape of my extended left boot, I cannot say. All I know is that some time in the course of the day, a Sanitäter came, dressed my wounds for pure form (they had already been anointed with French liquid mould), took me pickaback, tiny man though he was, and worked his way heavily, bent nearly double, over knapsacks ripped open, and rifles with their butt-ends smashed, over the tumbled corpses of French and German soldiers, till he landed me in the very crater of the mine sprung by the Germans in the morning. Quite a respectable hole, I must say, serving now as a waiting-room for a dozen wounded soldiers till they could be conveyed to the nearest ambulance. When my turn came, I was again loaded on sturdy Württemberger shoulders and taken to the dressing-station, a pretty comfortable dugout. The young Unterarzt on duty there dressed my wounds as thoroughly as was compatible with the circumstances. He told me that I was badly wounded and had more than one bone broken, but added that no vital organ had been touched.

A heap of stretchers lay near the

opening of the first-aid station; I was laid on one, and four soldiers carried me in the dark, with infinite labor and precaution, at a measured step which gave a not unpleasant swing to the stretcher. We finally reached a road, at a point where ambulance carriages were to fetch a batch of wounded Germans. I was to be taken to a field-hospital with them. Again I must say I met nothing but kindness at the hands of these privates; one of them, who was slightly wounded in the arm, even insisted on wrapping me in his great coat, for I had none, and he was afraid I might be cold, with my trousers ripped open lengthwise by the bomb.

I had not waited long on the roadside when a horse-carriage halted near our rather lamentable group, and I was hoisted up inside, stretcher, great coat and all, together with three more patients. One of the poor chaps must have felt very bad, for the moment the carriage started he began to howl and must have suffered frightfully from the ceaseless jolting. We were indeed relentlessly shaken from one side to the other, as this road, leading from Le Four de Paris to Varennes, was constantly under French artillery fire, so much so that the driver could not light his lamps for fear of being fired at. The big red cross painted on all sides would have been of little avail to us on such a pitch-dark night.

So we made slow and jerky headway, from one hastily-stopped shellhole to the next, till we pulled up before three lamp-lit windows. We were in a village of the Meuse, which I later heard was named Ecclise-Fontaine. I was in my turn hoisted down from the car, taken inside the house, and laid on an operating table. My wounds were disgracefully dirty and the German doctor cleansed them as well as he could; but nothing short of a bath could remove all the caked mud; as there was