Elation in the cause—From Nancy southward—A giant Frenchman—Personnel of the French machine—DÉjeuner—Father Joffre’s boarding establishment—A thrifty army—Responsibility in a democracy—Determination for final peace—“Rural free delivery” at the front—A card-indexed army—Their families—Battlefields that saved Paris—Souvenirs aplenty—Ruthless “military advantage”—A shattered farmhouse—Helping the farmers—Construction of trenches—In the front line trench—Watchful waiting—The Lorraine country—Widespread destruction—Another “Louvain”—A brave and great Sister—Thrilling attacks—“It was for France!”—His Honour, the Mayor—The tricolour in Lorraine.

Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare of war’s misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with the consciousness that it broke a burglar’s jaw.

A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes. The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were out of French Lorraine for good.

“What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!” said a Lorraine farmer. “Work will make my house whole. But nothing could ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is ours!”

I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there. Mon capitaine had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men. Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there; that he knew his work.

“Well, we’ve got good weather for it to-day, monsieur,” said a voice out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as before. These French privates talk to you and you talk to them. They are not simply moulds of flesh in military form who salute and salute and salute. They take an interest in your affairs and you take an interest in theirs; they make you feel like home folks.

The sun was shining—a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw in our Northern States—glistening on the snowy fields and slopes among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country. Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier makes ear muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who received it will get every stitch’s worth out of it.

To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted. They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers, some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in French slang; then all France prayed god-speed to its beloved piou-pious. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were poilus—bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from the labourer or the employer from the peasant.

Any one who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan gold field in ’97-’98 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose; social differences of habit had disappeared. That gentleman used to his bath and linen sheets and the hard living farmer or labourer—all had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the dugouts of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through the winter. Any “snob” had his edges trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which greeted us with curious interest.

“Perhaps President Wilson will make peace,” one said.

“When?” I asked.

A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:

“When we have Alsace-Lorraine back.”

Under a shed their dÉjeuner was cooking. This meal at noon is the meal of the day to the average Frenchman, who has only bread and coffee in the morning. They say he objects to fighting at luncheon time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. This interference with his gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious counter-attack. He would teach those “Boches” to leave him to eat his dÉjeuner in peace.

That appetising stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn’t blame them for objecting to being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple problem with France’s fine roads to feed that long line when it is stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each man and a known number of men to feed. From the railroad head trucks and autobusses take the supplies up to the distributing points. At one place I saw ten Paris autobusses, their signs painted out in a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had broken down through the war. The French take good care of their equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is, so is their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.

Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Czar. And he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.

One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a soldier. Commanders were worried. But as the winter wore on the spirit changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause taught them patience, brought them cheer. And another thing was the increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the organisation of the army was improving; every day that indescribable and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely held was growing.

Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on to take his place. Men at home who are twenty-two or three and unmarried, men who are twenty-eight or thirty and not long married, and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand how their own class feels.

In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go home they didn’t say “No!” all in a chorus, as if that were what the colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men, representing the people of France and not the cafÉs of Paris, would not keep France a republic.

Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over forever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus every one was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but for future generations.

“It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came in our day, and to us is the duty,” said one. You caught the spirit of comradeship passing the time with jests at one another’s expense. One of the men who was not a full thirty-third degree poilu had compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his shock of hair.

“I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for the Zeppelins,” said a comrade.

“Envy! Sheer envy!” was the retort. “Look at him!” and he pointed at some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a young grass plat that had come up badly.

“I don’t believe in air-tight beards,” was the response.

When I produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this: “Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry, 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121,” by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the number of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being’s individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.

“We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word,” all agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy’s intelligence.

“If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot here,” said mon capitaine.

These were the men who had not been long married. They were not yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home; perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of youth which makes comradeship easy.

But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy a vacation from the wife, for you know madame, in France, with all her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one very practical reason why they will fight well—and they have fought better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in their blood.

“Allons, messieurs!” said the tall major, who wanted us to see battle-fields. It required no escort to tell us where the battle-field was. We knew it when we came to it as you know the point reached by high tide on the sands—this field where many Gettysburgs were fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in the balance—as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended there the German invasion reached its limit.

Forests and streams and ditches and railroad culverts played their part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery walls, too. In all my battle-field visits in Europe I have not seen a single cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a crossroads where charges met and wrestled back and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over. Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him out in this fighting across these fields and through the forests, in a tug of war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and passion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that they carry on their backs, to give them a little cover. And there is the trench that stopped the Germans—the trench which they charged but could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.

We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around. The value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military advantage. Because churches are often on hilltops, because they are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces. When two men are fighting for life they don’t bother about upsetting a table with a vase, or notice any “Keep off the grass” signs; no, not even if the family Bible be underfoot.

None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm buildings was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car, but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made up my mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I’d make for the hayrake and avoid the windmill.

Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle. It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battle-field was etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.

Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal devil who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes grew hard.

“I’m afraid it was pretty bad!” he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: “We will die for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It only takes breath.”

“Allons, messieurs!”

As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in a poetic sense, for the brave poilus, veterans of Lorraine’s great battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why shouldn’t the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front and perhaps helping farmers back of some other point of the line?

Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing timbers and fascines for trench building, which explained why some of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker cases for shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shells for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen. Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.

“How do you like this kind of war?” we asked. It is the kind that irrigationists and subway excavators do.

“We’ve grown to be very fond of it,” was the answer. “It is a cultivated taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you have been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between you and the bullets.”

Now we alighted from the automobile and went forward on foot. We passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the work was done the civilian’s eye could grasp the principle. If one trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next, which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break through one barred door and there is another and another confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a marmite (saucepan) came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the continent of Europe.

We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible. Both sides were watching for any move of the other and meanwhile lying tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.

There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might receive a call—which meant death for many. But they were used to that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.

“No farther?” we asked our major.

“No farther!” he said. “This is risk enough for you. It looks very peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some marmites if it pleased him.” Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given not to do so—which adds another reason for military suspicion of the press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description. They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a wooden leg and red hair, would be in trying to get out of police headquarters when the doorman had his Bertillon photograph and measurements to go by.

That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals. It was “bothering” one of the German trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a breechlock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on the lawn below.

Our little group remained, not standing in the trench, but back of it in full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren’t worth a shot. In the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition. The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign. There must be fifteen dollars’ worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller, which was—emphasis on the past tense—a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.

“I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!” I exclaimed.

“There was no such fighting in Belgium,” was the answer.

Of course not, except in the southwestern corner, where the armies still face each other.

“Not all the damage was done by the Germans,” the major explained. “Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house, our guns let drive at that house,” he went on. “The owners of the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud—proud of our marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to swallow.”

For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here, unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

“However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves which is the Lord’s side in this war,” said Sister Julie. But I get ahead of my story.

In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction, with doors and windows intact, facing gaps where doors and windows had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had spared these buildings.

“Sister Julie!” the major called. A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt, on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets some celebrated person for the first time—a curiosity no less keen than if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.

Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses; through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and her four sister associates remained in Gerbeviller. When the town was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both wounded French and Germans, also wounded townspeople who could not flee with the others.

“You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?” she was asked.

“Frightened?” she answered. “I had not time to think of that. Go away? How could I when the Lord’s work had come to me?”

President PoincarÉ went in person to give her the Legion of Honour, the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the kitchen at the time, very busy cooking the meal for the sick whom the sisters are still caring for. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to burn. After the complexity of French politics, President PoincarÉ was anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.

“He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be President,” she said. “I thought that the president of France would be a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise. Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-du—yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in Paris. They were very agreeable, too.”

“And your Legion of Honour?”

“Oh, my medal that M. le PrÉsident gave me! I keep that in a drawer. I do not wear it every day when I am in my working clothes.”

“Have you ever been to Paris?”

“No, monsieur.”

“They will make a great ado over you when you go.”

“I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my home. There is much to do here, and there will be more to do when the people who were driven away return.”

These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war’s horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism to witness.

What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie’s mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.

Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal. Though her hair is white, youth’s optimism and confidence in the future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present. The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the streets again; there was a lot of the Lord’s work to do yet.

In every word and thought she is French—French in her liveliness of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town, she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome them back.

In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.

Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine guns poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared. But the French, who were fighting for Sister Julie’s town, would not stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett’s men did when the Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades approached to give succour the machine guns blazed more death, because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the woods by hitting them from another point.

We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back—which requires some nerve—and charged a German trench on rising ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond. Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put the Germans out of the woods.

The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows—men of the type we stopped to chat with in the village—hastening to the front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too, who left their civil occupations at the call of arms. One of the eight survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered quietly: “It was for France!” How often I have heard that as a reason for courage or sacrifice! The brave enemies of France have learned to respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before the war began. “That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and surrounded the French army,” I was told. “However, they had to go in such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five hundred shells afterward to destroy it, in vain.”

It was dusk when we entered the city of LunÉville for the second time. Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the block. But LunÉville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its sentries among the ruins! Happy, triumphant LunÉville, with its poilus instead of German sentries! “We are going to meet the mayor,” said the major.

First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to his house, which was a fine, old eighteenth-century building. If you could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke-blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set it on fire before evacuating the town. An ascent of a handsome old staircase and we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved old mantels, where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of forty.

“I have been in Amerique two months. So much English do I speak. No more!” said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his wife, who spoke not even “so much” English, but French as fast and as piquantly as only a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was seventeen, was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon. He was a sturdy youngster; a type of Young France who will make the France of the future.

“You hate to see him go?” I asked.

“It is for France!” she answered.

We had cakes and tea and a merrier—at least, a more heartfelt—party than at any mayor’s reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim, silent soldiers. Foreigners say we do. Maybe it is a democratic weakness. I heard story on story of the German occupation, and how the mayor was put in jail and held as hostage, and what a German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as headquarters. Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France. Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.

Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her adored tricolour floats over those ruins.