We were three automobiles strong when we went out of Nancy, along what they call the "LunÉville road." That was yesterday, as I write, and already it seems long ago! The third and biggest car belonged to the PrÉfet; gray and military looking, driven by a soldier in uniform; and this time Dierdre O'Farrell was with us. I was wondering if she went "under orders," or if she wished to see the sights we were to see—among them, perhaps, her elusive doctor!

We turned south, leaving town, and presently passed—at Dombasle—astonishingly huge salt-works, with rubble-heaps tall as minor pyramids. On each apex stood a thing like the form of a giant black woman in a waggling gas-mask and a helmet. I could have found out what these weird engines were, no doubt, but I preferred to remember them as mysterious monsters.

At a great, strange church of St. Nicolas, in the old town of St. Nicolas-du-Port, we stopped, because the PrÉfet's daughters had told us of a magic stone in the pavement which gives good fortune to those who set foot on it. Only when several of us were huddled together, with a foot each on the sacred spot, were we told that it meant marriage before the new year. If the spell works, Dierdre O'Farrell, Brian, and I will all be married in less than four months. But St. Nicolas is a false prophet where we are concerned. Brian and I will never marry. Even if poor Brian should fall head over ears in love, he wouldn't ask a girl to share his broken life: he has told me this. As for me, I can never love any man after Jim Beckett. The least penance I owe is to be faithful forever to his memory and my own falsehood!

St. Nicolas is the patron saint of the neighbourhood, so it's right that from his little town and his big church all the country round should open out to the eye, as if to do him homage.

From the hill of LÉomont we could see to the south the far-off, famous Forest of Parroy; away to the north, the blue heights of La Grande Couronne, where the fate of Nancy was decided in 1914; to the west, a purple haze like a mourning wreath of violets hung over the valley of the Meurthe, and the tragic little tributary river Mortagne; beyond, we could picture with our mind's eyes the Moselle and the Meuse.

But LÉomont was not a place where one could stand coldly thinking of horizons. It drew all thoughts to itself, and to the drama played out upon its miniature mountain. There was fought one of the fiercest and most heroic single battles of the war.

We had to desert the cars, and walk up a rough track to the ruined farmhouse which crowned the hill; a noble, fortified farmhouse that must have had the dignity of a chÂteau before the great fight which shattered its ancient walls. Now it has the dignity of a mausoleum. Long ago, in Roman days when Diana, Goddess of the Moon, was patron of LunÉville and the country round, a temple of stone and marble in her honour and a soaring fountain crowned the high summit of LÉomont, for all the world to see. Her influence is said to reign over the whole of Lorraine, from that day to this, St. Nicholas being her sole rival: and a prophecy has come down through the centuries that no evil may befall Diana's citadels, save in the "dark o' the moon," when the protectress is absent. LunÉville was overrun in the "dark o' the moon"; and it was then also that the battle of LÉomont was fought, ending in the vast cellars, where no man was left alive.

In these days of ours, it's a wonderful and romantic mountain, sacred as a monument forever, to the glory of the French soldiers who did not die in vain. The scarred face of the ruined house—its stones pitted by shrapnel as if by smallpox—gazes over Lorraine as the Sphinx gazes over the desert: calm, majestic, sad, yet triumphant. And under the shattered walls, among fallen buttresses and blackened stumps of oaks, are the graves of LÉomont's heroes; graves everywhere, over the hillside; graves in the open; graves in sheltered corners where wild flowers have begun to grow; their tricolour cockades and wooden crosses mirrored in the blue of water-filled shell-holes; graves in the historic cellars, covered with a pall of darkness; graves along the slope of the hill, where old trenches have left ruts in the rank grass.

An unseen choir of bird-voices was singing the sweetest requiem ever sung for the dead; yet LÉomont in its majestic loneliness saddened us, even the irrepressible Puck. We were sad and rather silent all the way to Vitrimont; and Vitrimont, at first glance, was a sight to make us sadder than any we had seen. There had been a Vitrimont, a happy little place, built of gray and rose-red stones; now, of those stones hardly one lies upon another, except in rubble heaps. And yet, Vitrimont isn't sad as others of the ruined towns are sad. It even cheered us, after LÉomont, because a star of hope shines over the field of desolation—a star that has come out of the west. Some wonderful women of San Francisco decided to "adopt" Vitrimont, as one of the little places of France which had suffered most in the war. Two of them, Miss Polk and Miss Crocker—girls rather than women—gave themselves as well as their money to the work. In what remains of Vitrimont—what they are making of Vitrimont—they live like two fresh roses that have taken root in a pile of ashes. With a few books, a few bowls of flowers, pictures, and bits of bright chintz they have given charm to their poor rooms in the half-ruined house of a peasant. This has been their home for many months, from the time when they were the only creatures who shared Vitrimont with its ghosts: but now other homes are growing under their eyes and through their charity; thanks to them, the people of the destroyed village are trooping back, happy and hopeful. The church has been repaired (that was done first, "because it is God's house") with warm-coloured pink walls and neat decoration; and plans for the restoring of the whole village are being carried out, while the waiting inhabitants camp in a village of toy-like bungalows given by the French Government. I never saw such looks of worshipping love cast upon human beings as those of the people of Vitrimont for these two American girls. I'm sure they believe that Miss Crocker and Miss Polk are saints incarnated for their sakes by "la Sainte Vierge." One old man said as much!

He was so old that it seemed as if he could never have been young, yet he was whistling a toothless but patriotic whistle, over some bit of amateur-carpenter work, in front of a one-room bungalow. Inside, visible through the open door, was the paralyzed wife he had lately wheeled "home" to Vitrimont, in some kind of a cart. "Oh, yes, we are happy!" he stopped whistling to say. "We are fortunate, too. We think we have found the place where our street used to be, and these Angels—we do not call them Demoiselles, but Angels—from America are going to build us a new home in it. We have seen the plan. It is more beautiful than the old!"

Wherever we passed a house on the road to LunÉville, and in town itself, as we came in, we saw notices—printed and written—to remind us that we were in the war-zone, if we forgot for an instant. "Logement militaire," or "Cave voÛtÉe, 200 places—400 places." Those hospitable cellars advertising their existence in air raids and bombardments must be a comforting sight for passers-by, now and then; but no siren wailed us a warning. We drove on in peace; and I—disappointed at Vitrimont—quietly kept watch for a tall, thin figure of a man with a slight limp. At any moment, I thought, I might see him, for at LunÉville he lives—if he lives anywhere!

I was so eager and excited that I could hardly turn my mind to other things; but Brian, not knowing why I should be absent-minded, constantly asked questions about what we passed. Julian O'Farrell had exchanged his sister for Mr. and Mrs. Beckett, whom he had persuaded to take the short trip in his ramshackle taxi. His excuse was that Mother Beckett would deal out more wisely than Dierdre his Red Cross supplies to the returned refugees; so we had the girl with us; and I caught reproachful glances if I was slow in answering my blind brother. She herself suspects him as a poseur, yet she judges me careless of his needs—which I should find funny, if it didn't make me furious! Just to see what Dierdre would do, and perhaps to provoke her, sometimes I didn't answer at all, but left her to explain our surroundings to Brian. I hardly thought she would respond to the silent challenge, but almost ostentatiously she did.

She cried, "There's a castle!" when we came to the fine and rather staid chÂteau which Duke Stanislas loved, and where he died. She even tried to describe it for Brian, with faltering self-consciousness, and the old streets which once had been "brilliant as Versailles, full of Queen Marie's beautiful ladies." Now, they are gray and sad, even those streets which show no scars from the three weeks' martyrdom of German rule. Soldiers pass, on foot and in motors, yet it's hard to realize that before the war LunÉville was one of the gayest, grandest garrison towns of France, rich and industrious, under Diana's special protection. Just because she was away in her moon-chariot, one dark and dreadful night, all has changed since then. But she'll come back, and bless her ancient place of LunÆ Villa, in good time!

It was here, Brian reminded me, that they drew up the treaty which gave the Rhine frontier to France, after Napoleon won the Battle of Marengo. I wonder if the Germans remembered this in 1914 when they came?

We lunched at an hotel, in a restaurant crowded with French officers; and not a civilian there except ourselves. I was hoping that Paul Herter might come in, for the tragic Rue Princesse Marie is not far away—and even a Wandering Jew must eat! He did not come; but I almost forgot my new disappointment in hearing the French officers talk about Lorraine.

They were in the midst of a discussion when we came in, and when they had all bowed politely to us, they took up its thread where it had broken off. A colonel—a Lorrainer—was saying that out of the wealth of Lorraine (stolen wealth, he called it!) Germany had built up her fortune as a united nation, in a few years far exceeding the indemnity received in 1871. Germany had known that there were vast stores of iron; but the amazing riches in phosphorus ores had come to her as a surprise. If she had guessed, never would she have agreed to leave more than half the deposit on the French side of the frontier! Well enough for Prussian boasters to say that Germany's success was due to her own industry and supervirtue, or that her tariff schemes had worked wonders. But take away the provinces she tore from France, and she will be a Samson shorn! Take away Lorraine and the world will be rid once and for all of the German menace!

When we left LunÉville there was still hope from GerbÉviller. Herter is often there, it seems. Besides, GerbÉviller was the principal end and aim of our day's excursion. Once no more than a pleasant town of quiet beauty on a pretty river, now it is a monument historique, the Pompeii of Lorraine.

As we arrived the sun clouded over suddenly, and the effect was almost theatrical. From gold the light had dimmed to silver. In the midst of the afternoon, we saw GerbÉviller as if by moonlight in the still silence of night. On the outskirts we forsook our three cars, and walked slowly through the dead town, awestruck and deeply thoughtful as if in a church where the body of some great man lay in state.

There was not a sound except, as at LÉomont, the unseen choir of bird-voices; but their song emphasized the silence. In the pale light the shells of wrecked houses glimmered white, like things seen deep down under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness with his loving touch.

GerbÉviller's tragic little river Mortagne gleamed silver-bright beneath a torn lace of delicate white flowers that was like a veil flung off by a fugitive bride. It ran sparkling under the motionless wheel of a burned mill, and twinkled on—the one living thing the Germans left—to flow through the park of a ruined chÂteau.