In this picturesque country where countless thousands fought and died, down through the bloody centuries since and before the Christian era, where Julius Cæsar paused in his far flung raids to dictate new inserts to his commentaries, where kings and queens and dukes and pretenders left undying traces of ambition's stormy urgings, there it was that American soldiers, in training for the war of wars, spent week-end holidays and mixed the breath of romance with the drag of their cigarettes.
The extender of Roman borders divided that region into three parts, according to the testimony of the first Latin class, but he neglected to mention that of these three parts the one decreed for American occupation was the most romantic of them all.
It is late on a Saturday afternoon and I accept the major's offer of a seat in his mud-bespattered "Hunka Tin." The field guns have ceased their roar for the day and their bores will be allowed to cool over Sunday. Five per cent. of the men at the post have received the coveted town leave.
They form a khaki fresco on the cab and sides of the giant commissary trucks that raise the dust along the winding white road over the hills. Snorting motorcycles with two men over the motor and an officer in the side car skim over the ground, passing all others. A lukewarm sun disappears in a slot in the mountains and a blue grey mist forms in the valleys. A chill comes over the air and a cold new moon looks down and laughs.
It is a long ride to the ancient town, but speed laws and motor traps are unknown and the hood of the Detroit Dilemma shakes like a wet dog as her sizzling hot cylinders suck juice from a full throttle. We cross one divide through a winding road bordered by bushy trees and as orderly as a national park. We coast through a hillside hamlet of barking dogs and saluting children who stand at smiling attention and greet our passage with a shrill "Veev La Mereek" (Vive l'Amérique).
We scud across a broad, level road built well above the lowland, and climb through zig-zagging avenues of stately poplars to the tunnel that pierces the backbone of the next ridge.
While the solid rock walls of the black bore reverberate with the echoes from our exhaust, we emerge on a road that turns sharply to the left and hugs a cliff. Below winds a broad river that looks like mother of pearl in the moonlight. The mountain walls on either side rise at angles approximating 45 degrees, and in the light their orderly vineyards look like the squares on a sloping checkerboard. In front of us and to the right the flanking ridges converge to a narrow gorge through which the river Doub runs to loop the town.
Commanding this gorge from the crests of the two rocky heights are sinister sentinels whose smooth, grey walls and towers rise sheer from the brink of the cliffs. The moonlight now catching the ramparts of the em-battlements splashes them with strokes of white that seem ever brighter in contrast with the darker shadows made by projecting portions of the walls. Spaniard and Moor knew well those walls, and all the kingly glory that hurried France to the reign of terror has slept within their shadows.
Our way down the cliff side is hewn out of the beetling rock. To our left, a jagged wall of rock rises to the sky. To our right, a step, rock-tumbled declivity drops to the river's edge.