 CHAPTER I. THE LOOK OF PARIS, AUGUST 1914 TO FEB. 1915. 1. AUGUST. On the thirtieth of July 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple trees on the edge of a field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border of a woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely flat and tame. At other moments, the sensitive imagination sees in every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless, vigilant attachment of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated tasks, the serenity of the scenes smiled away the war-rumours which had hung on us since morning. All day the sky had been banked with thunderclouds, but by the time we reached Chart, towards four o'clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible. We were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths of darkness and steeped in a blaze of midsummer sun, the familiar windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now they widened into dark shored pools splashed with sunset, now glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others the sails of galleons bound for the purple islands, and in the western wall the scattered fires of the rose window hung like a constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes from these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few ultralights, seemed to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances, and its little islands of illusion. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it confuses into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of short gave us in that perfect hour. It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights of St. Cloud and Soren, the reaches of the Seine trembled with the blue-pink luster of an early Monet. The bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the midst of fountains and the ethereal obelisk, and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanist graces, seemed to lie by her riverside like a princess, guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower. The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed them, everybody repeated them. War! Of course there couldn't be war! The cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet over the edge, but the whole incalculable weight of things as they were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Paris went on steadily about her midsummer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists, who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century. All the while everyone knew that other work was going on also. The whole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation. The sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balmyness of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till the evening papers came. They said little or nothing except what everyone was already declaring all over the country. We don't want war. May you'll focus à la finisse. This kind of thing has got to stop. That was the only phrase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war so much the better, no one in France wanted it. All who spent the first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of feeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country and every heart in it was ready. At the dress-makers the next morning the tired fitters were preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and anxious. Decidedly there was a new weight of apprehension in the air. And in the rue Royal, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of white paper against the wall of the Ministière de la Marine. General mobilisation they read. And an armed nation knows what that means. But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers-by read the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations. The dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatised. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen across the path of an orderly, laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilisation. That evening, in a restaurant of the rue Royal, we sat at a table in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what mobilisation was—a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were on foot and carrying their luggage, for since dawn every cab and taxi and motor-omnibus had disappeared. The war-office had thrown out its dragnet and caught them all in. The crowd that passed our window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the mobilisables of the first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their families and friends. But among them were little clusters of bewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, and watching their luggage pushed before them on hand carts, puzzled in articulate waves caught in the cross-trides racing to a maelstrom. In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured out patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring obligation to stand up for the Marseillais, to stand up for God Save the King, to stand up for the Russian national anthem, to stand up again for the Marseillais. Et dire que ce sont des engois qui jouent au cela, a humorist remarked from the pavement. As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the loiterers outside began to join in the war-song. Allons, debuts! and the loyal round begins again. La chanson du départ is a frequent demand, and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A sort of quiet humor was the note of the street. Down the rue Royal, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants were attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the boulevard like its garland of arc lights. It was a night of singing and acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It was Paris-Baudodrie at its best. Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers, the steady stream of conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion was that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselessly streaming by were serious but not sad, nor was there any air of bewilderment, the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible. They understood their stake in the job, and accepted it. The next day the army of Midsummer Travel was immobilized to let the other army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing of concierges, vain quests for invisible calves, haggard hours of waiting in the queue at Cooks. No train stirred except to carry soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way unto a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night, could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts, to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels suddenly reduced to the intimacies and makeshift of a Latin quarter-pension. Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual paralysis of the city, as the motors, taxis, cabs, and vans had vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left the sun. The canal boats, too, were gone, or lay motionless. Loading and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed in emptiness, all the endless avenues stretched away to desert distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes. Paris, so intensely conscious, yet so strangely entranced, seemed to have had curar injected into all her veins. The next day, the second of August, from the terrace of the Hotel de Créan, one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life. Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la Conqueur, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in detachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. One detachment stopped before the black veiled statue of Strasbourg and laid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstration would at once have attracted a crowd, but at the very moment when it might have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst, it excited no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to give a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did not even stop to look. The meaning of this apparent indifference was obvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that mobilize, those who stay behind must do the same. For each French household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a complete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts, unnoticed, paid their tribute to the cause, and passed on. Looked back on from these sterner months, those early days in Paris, in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, where the light of the ideal and the abstract, the sudden flaming up of national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation, cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on war rather than facing its realities. Something of this sense of exaltation seemed to penetrate the throngs who streamed up and down the boulevards till late into the night. All wheeled traffic had ceased, except that of the rare taxi cabs impressed to carry conscripts to the stations, and the middle of the boulevard was as thronged with foot-passengers as an Italian marketplace on a Sunday morning. The vast tide swayed up and down at a slow pace, breaking now and then to make room for one of the volunteer legions which were forming at every corner—Italian, Romanian, South American, North American—each headed by its national flag and hailed with cheering as it passed. But even the cheers were sober. Paris was not to be shaken out of her self-imposed serenity. One felt something nobly conscious and voluntary in the mood of this quiet multitude. Yet it was a mixed throng, made up of every class, from the scum of the exterior boulevards to the cream of the fashionable restaurants. These people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across a frontier. Now, workers and idlers, thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion. The people, luckily, predominated. The faces of workers looked best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them, each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium flash of passion. I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women, and also the small but significant fact that every one of them had remembered to bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had to take their chance of seeing what they could through the forest of human legs. But every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch, scores and scores of small, serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the quiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign that they had not been forgotten that night. 2. We had been shown, impressively, what it was to live through a mobilization. Now we were to learn that mobilization is only one of the concomitance of martial law, and that martial law is not comfortable to live under—at least, till one gets used to it. At first its main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainly to be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life, and in that line it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructions began to shower on us after the lull of the first days—instructions as to what to do and what not to do, in order to make our presence tolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreigners could not remain in France without satisfying the authorities as to their nationality and antecedents, and, to do this, necessitated repeated ineffective visits to chancerie, consulates, and police station, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants to permit the entrance of one more. Between these vain pilgrimages the traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railway stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must also be vis by the police. There was a moment when it seemed that one's inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable visa. To obtain which, more fruitless hours, must be lived on grimy stairways between perspiring layers of fellow aliens. Meanwhile one's money was probably running short, and one must cable or telegraph for more. Ah, but cables and telegrams must be these too, and even when they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent. Then one could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of words contained in a New York address seemed to multiply as the francs in one's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatched it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response, impossible at present, making every effort. It is fair to add that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature of the French Functionary, who for the first time, probably in the long tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule and was kind. Luckily too, these incessant comings and goings involved much walking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler and more beautiful each day. Never had such blue-gray softness of afternoon brooded over Paris, such sunset turned the heights of the Trocadero into Dido's Carthage, never above all so rich a moon ripened through such perfect evenings. The sun itself had no small share in this mysterious increase of the city's beauty. Released from all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into long silken reaches in which keys and monuments at last saw their unbroken images. At night the firefly lights of the boats had vanished, and the reflections of the street lamps were lengthened into streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calm current like fluted water-weeds. Then the moon rose and took possession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming and enlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength and repose. There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of the August evenings, so exposed, yet so serene, as though her very beauty shielded her. So gradually we fell into the habit of living under martial law. After the first days of flustered adjustment the personal inconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of there not being more, of not being called on to contribute some greater sacrifice of comfort to the cause. Within the first week over two-thirds of the shops had closed, the greater number bearing on their shuttered windows the notice, pour cause de mobilisation, which show that the patron and staff were at the front. But enough remained open to satisfy every ordinary want, and the closing of the others served to prove how much one could do without. Provisions were as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it was easier to buy food than to have it cooked. The restaurants were closing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal, and wait a longer time to get it. A few hotels still carried on a halting life, galvanised by an occasional in-rush of travel from Belgium and Germany, but most of them had closed or were being hastily transformed into hospitals. The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with red crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with uvoire or hôpital beneath. There was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the war were full of a kind of unrealising confidence, not boastful or fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose, that the experience of the next few months was to develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, the mood of early August, the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was Desert Hush more complete. The silence of a street is always so much deeper than the silence of wood or field. The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression of suspended life. The days were dumb enough, but at night the Hush became acute. In the quarter-iron habit, always deserted in summer, the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintest pinprick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence. I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and the tread of the policeman guarding the embassy across the street beat against the pavement like a series of detonations. Even the variegated noises of the cities waking up had ceased. If any sweepers, scavengers, or ragpickers still plied their trades, they did it as secretly as ghosts. I remember one morning being roused out of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room. I sat up with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchange of bonjour in the street. Another fact that kept the reality of war from Paris was the curious absence of troops in the streets. After the first rush of conscripts hiring to their military bases, it might have been imagined that the reign of peace had set in. While smaller cities were swarming with soldiers no glitter of arms was reflected in the empty avenues of the capital, no military music sounded through them. Paris scorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children on the mere sight of her beauty. It was enough. Even when the news of the first ephemeral successes in Alsace began to come in, the Parisians did not swerve from their even gate. The news boys did all the shouting, and even theirs was presently silenced by decree. It seemed as though it had been unanimously instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect resemble the Paris of 1870, and as though this resolution had passed at birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date and ignorant of its bitter lesson. The unanimity of self-restraint was the notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into an unsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spirit might have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bred in peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it is precisely on such a mood that easy triumphs might have been supposed to have the most disturbing effect. It was the crowd in the street that shouted, Auberlain! in 1870. Now the crowd in the street continued to mind its own business, in spite of showers of extras and two sanguine bulletins. I remember the morning when our butcher's boy brought the news that the first German flag had been hung out on the balcony of the Ministry of War. Now I thought the Latin will boil over, and I wanted to be there to see it. I hurried down the quiet rue de Montignac, turned the corner of the Place Saint-Certille, and came on an orderly crowd filling the street before the Ministry of War. The crowd was so orderly that the few Pacific gestures of the police easily cleared away for passing cabs, and for the military motors perpetually dashing up. It was composed of all classes, and there were many family groups, with little boys straddling their mother's shoulders, or lifted up by the policemen when they were too heavy for their mothers. It is safe to say that there was hardly a man or a woman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front, and there before them hung the enemy's first flag—a splendid silk flag, white and black and crimson, and embroidered with gold. It was the flag of an Alsatian regiment, a regiment of Prussianized Alsace. It symbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job that lay ahead of them. It symbolized also their finest ardor and their noblest hate, and the reason why, if every other reason failed, France could never lay down arms till the last of such flags was low. And there they stood and looked at it, not dullly or uncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence, as if already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it others like it, foreseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed to be men's hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the mothers whose weak arms held them up, so they gazed and went on, and made way for others like them, who gazed in their turn, and went on too. All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the same crowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily at the flag, and knew what its being there meant. That, in August, was the look of Paris. 3. February February dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but they stop at nightfall, and the river is inky smooth, with the same long weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer and paler, bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the keys is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm tower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few street-lamps throw their watery zig-zags. The shops are shut, and the windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are all blind. In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche, the darkness is even deeper, and the few scattered lights and quartz or cité create effects of perenniesi like mystery. The gleam of the chestnut roaster's brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurous Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies. I turn on my way home, into an empty street between high-garden walls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end. Not a soul is in sight between me and that light. My steps echo endlessly in the silence. Presently a dim figure comes around the corner ahead of me. Man or woman? Impossible to tell till I overtake it. The February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are indistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them. If you know the quarter you count doors from the corner or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment, if you are in a strange street you must ask at the nearest tobacconists. For as for finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn't tell him from your grandmother. Such after six months of war are the nights of Paris. The days are less remarkable and less romantic. Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone, or so at least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of life. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries, even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her theatres open and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired, Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to those who lived through that first sunlit silent month, the streets today show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the motorbuses and of the huge lumbering commercial vans leaves many a forgotten perspective open, and reveals many a lost grace of architecture. But the taxi cabs and private motors are almost as abundant as in peacetime, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those unrivaled engines of destruction, the hospital, and war-office motors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively producing patriotic drama or mixed programs seasonal with sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful kilometres. For a while in September and October the streets were made picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery and the aggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh faces and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to militarism which Paris offers to the casual sightseer is the occasional drilling of a handful of pew-pew on the muddy reaches of the Place des Anvalides. But there is another army in Paris. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September days, lamentable rear-guard of the Allies' retreat on Paris. Since then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have percolated through all currents of Paris' life, so that wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy confident strongly stepping Parisians, one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving, men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired out babies pressed against their shoulders, the great army of the refugees. Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment or that other look of concentrated horror full of the reflection of flames and ruins can shake off the obsession of the refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avitzano. They were plowing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now, here they are, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels, and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet or intelligible or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal ticket, and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes. What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing, and the sign is a good one, they are refilling the shops, and especially, of course, the great department stores. In the early war days there was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces where one strayed between miles of unpurchased wares and quest of vanished salesmen. A few clerks, of course, were left. Enough one would have thought for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few there were did not care to be disturbed. They lurked behind their walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to be discovered. And when one had coked them out they went through the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering that anyone should care to buy. I remember once at the Louvre seeing the whole force of a department, including the salesmen I was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert their posts simultaneously to gather about a motorcyclist in a muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tails from the front. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself, and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman. I say shop, instead of buy, to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without. It is evident that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the department store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual buying of supplies for hospitals and work rooms, the incessant stoking up of the innumerable centres of charitable production, there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments, except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long run and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the tea-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively, and economically, to concerts, but the swinging doors of the department stores suck her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions. No one in this respect would wish the look of Paris to be changed. It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again, even though the site is less interesting than that of the other crowds streaming daily, and on Sunday in immensely augmented numbers, across the Pont Alexandre-Tois, to the great court of the Anvalide, where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs, face to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are few in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a blow. There are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired a new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff it is molded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human clay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals, idealized images of what they were in the flesh, and the masks of some of the men, those queer, tormented, Gallic masks, crushed in and squat and a little satyr-like, look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation. They are looking, one and all, at France, erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing different widths of Valenciennes at the lace counter, all have something of that vision in their eyes, or else one does not see the ones who haven't. It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in arms. There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for the coming and going of the orderlies attached to the war-office and the military government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets. No sign that is except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately that they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of the capital stood almost empty, while others all over the country were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded have been much speculated upon and variously explained. One of its results may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinary moral health which has given its tone to the whole country, and which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any misery. And misery is enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms, and their wares usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave these young faces. One hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified, and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness, and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces. CHAPTER II. IN OUR GONE. 1. The permission to visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitals behind the lines gave me, at the end of February, my first sight of war. Paris is no longer included in the military zone, either in fact or in appearance. Though it is still manifestly under the war-cloud, its air of reviving activity produces the illusion that the menace which casts the cloud is far off, not only in distance, but in time. Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness, and it is startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from such an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent scents of war. Going eastward one begins to feel the change just beyond Moe. Between that quiet Episcopal city and the hill-town of Moe-Mirai, some forty miles farther east, there are no sensational evidences of the great conflict of September, only here and there in an unplowed field or among the fresh brown furrows, a little mound with a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless one begins to perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Moe and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely plowman and his team stood out against the sky, or a child and an old woman looked from a doorway. But many of the fields were fallow, and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts driven by peasants, a stray woodcutter and a copse, a road-mender hammering at his stones, but already the civilian motor had disappeared, and all the dust-colored cars dashing past us were marked with the red cross, or the number of an army division. At every bridge and railway crossing, a sentinel, standing in the middle of the road with a lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined our papers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangible proof of military rule, but with the descent of the first hill beyond Malmyrae there came the positive feeling, this is war. Along the white road rippling away eastward over the dimpled country, the army motors were pouring by in endless lines, broken now and then by the dark mass of a tramping regiment or the clatter of a train of artillery. In the intervals between these waves of military traffic we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing past of dispatch bears on motorcycles, and of hideously hooting little motors carrying goggled officers and goat-skins and woollen helmets. The villages along the road all seemed empty, not figuratively, but literally empty. None of them has suffered from the German invasion saved by the destruction here and there of a single house on which some random malice has wrecked itself, but since the general flight in September all have remained abandoned, or are provisionally occupied by troops, and the rich country between Malmyrae and Chalon is a desert. The first site of Sham is extraordinarily exhilarating. The old town lying so pleasantly between canal and river is the headquarters of an army, not of a corps or of a division, but of a whole army, and the network of grey provincial streets about the Romanesque towers of Notre-Dame rustles with the movement of war. The square before the principal hotel, the incomparably named Haute-Merdu, is as vivid a site as any scene of modern war can be. Rows of grey motor lorries and omnibuses do not lend themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and spitting and spurting motorcycles and torpedo-racers are no substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curviting of chargers. But once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and the neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowded, clattering square becomes positively brilliant. It is a vision of one of the central functions of a great war in all its concentrated energy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in. Yet even here such suggestions are never long out of sight, for one cannot pass through Chalon without meeting, on their way from the station, a long line of eclop, the unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the awful struggle. These poor wretches, in their thousands, are daily shipped back from the front to rest and be restored, and it is a grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of eyes that have seen what one dare not picture. If one could think away the eclop in the street and the wounded in their hospitals, Chalon would be an invigorating spectacle. When we drove up to the hotel, even the grey motors and the sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky. The continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding up of officers—for some still ride—the arrival of much-decorated military personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of red cross ambulances and the passing of detachments for the front—all these are sights that the Pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed, energetic heads about the packed tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to get to Chalon, and almost every table is occupied by officers and soldiers. For once off-duty there seems to be no rank distinction in this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he chooses to treat himself to the excellent fare of the eau de merdeux, has as good a right to it as his colonel. The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting. The mere attempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing. A week's experience near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in the French army are alike, either in colour or in cut. Within the last two years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue, and the range of their experiment is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin's egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. The result attained is the conviction that no blue is really inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh, new, slaty tints are no less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But to this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added—the poppy red of the spahy's tunics, and various other less familiar colours—grey, and a certain greenish khaki, the use of which is due to the fact that the cloth supply has given out, and that all available materials are employed. As for the differences in cut, the uniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose-belted jacket copied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms and ranks embroidered on these diversified habits add a new element of perplexity. The aviator's wings, the motorist's wheel, and many of the newer symbols are easily recognisable. But there are all the other arms, and the doctors, and the stretcher-bearers, the sappers, and miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of this great host, which is really all the nation. The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost as many types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good. One begins to understand, if one has failed to before, why the French say of themselves, la France est une nation guerrière. War is the greatest of paradoxes, the most senseless and disheartening of human retroaggressions, and yet the stimulant of qualities of soul which in every race can seemingly find no other means of renewal. Everything depends, therefore, on the category of impulses that war excites in a people. Looking at the faces at chalons, one sees at once in which sense the French are une nation guerrière. It is not too much to say that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables, young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average, have the same look of quiet authority. It is as though all nervosity, fussiness, little personal oddities, meanness and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance. More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless or unimportant things till the first of last August, and now each one of them, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knows it, and has been made over by knowing it. Our road on leaving chalons continued to run north-eastward toward the hills of the Argonne. We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging in the doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs, soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cooking over gypsy fires in the farmyards. In the patches of woodland along the road we came upon more soldiers, cutting down pine saplings, chopping them into even lengths and loading them on hand carts, with the green boughs piled on top. We soon saw to what use they were put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry box of mud and straw and plated pine branches was plastered against a bank, or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of seventy-fives. Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motorvans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants, and the stables of woven pine boughs which stood nearby might have been the huge huts of their herdsmen. The country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which German fury spent itself most bestially during the abominable September days. Halfway between Chalon and Saint-Menehude we came on the first evidence of the invasion, the lamentable ruins of the village of Ove. These pleasant villages of the N, with their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed granaries with espaliered gable ends, are all much of one pattern, and one can easily picture what Ove must have been as it looked out in the blue September weather, above the ripening pairs of its garden to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond. Now it is a mere waste of rubble and cinders, not one threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined villages after Ove, but this was the first, and perhaps for what reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings, and rendings apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present, of all that accumulated warmth, nothing was left, but a brick heap, and some twisted stove-pipes. When we ran on towards Saint Menaud, the names on our map showed us that, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles to the north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannon yet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the struggle was the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line of grey-coated figures tramping towards us between the bayonets of their captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh bag from the hills, of a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-torn than one could have wished. Their broad, blonde faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy. They seemed none too sorry for their fate. Our past from the general headquarters carried us to Saint Menaud, on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the headquarters of the division for a farther extension. The staff are lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and where sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted by theatrical posters, and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured counterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones, the rat-tatt of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation, and the coming and going of hurried dispatch-bearers and orderlies. The extension to the permit was presently delivered with the courteous request that we should push on to Verdun as fast as possible, as civilian motors were not wanted on the road that afternoon. And this request, coupled with the evident stir of activity at headquarters, gave us the impression that there must be a good deal happening beyond the low line of hills to the north. How much there was, we were soon to know. We left Saint Menaud at about eleven, and before twelve o'clock we were nearing a large village on a ridge from which the land swept away to right and left in ample reaches. The first glimpse of the outlying houses showed nothing unusual, but presently the main street turned and dipped downward, and below and beyond us lay a long stretch of ruins. The calcined remains of Clermont-en-Argonne, destroyed by the Germans on the Fourth of September. The free and lofty situation of the little town, for it was really a good deal more than a village, makes its present state the more lamentable. One can see it from so far off, and through the torn traceries of its ruined church, the eye travels over so lovely a stretch of country. No doubt its beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it. At the farther end of what was once the main street, another small knot of houses has survived. Chief among them is the hospice for old men, where Sister Gabrielle Ronnais, where the authorities of Clermont took to their hills, stayed behind to defend her charges, and where ever since she has nursed an undiminishing stream of wounded from the eastern front. We found Sir Ronnais, with her sisters, preparing the midday meal of her patients in the little kitchen of the hospice—the kitchen, which is also her dining-room and private office. She insisted on our finding time to share the filet and fried potatoes that were just being taken off the stove, and while we lunched she told us the story of the invasion. Of the hospice doors broken down, a coup de croce, and the gray officers bursting in with revolvers, and finding her there before them in the big, vaulted vestibule, alone with my old men and my sisters. Sir Gabrielle Ronnais is a small, round, active woman, with a shrewd and ruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the dark background of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full of warmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her tail. She does not spare epithets in talking of C'est C'est Tinde Allement. These sisters and nurses of the front have seemed sights to dry up the last drop of sentimental pity. But through all the horror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing about her, and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetual threat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitable absurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address the officer in command, because he was so tall that I couldn't see up to his shoulder straps. Et y'les été tu comme ça?" she added, a sort of reluctant admiration in her eyes. A subordinate good sister had just cleared the table and poured out our coffee, when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-fact tone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley. She added calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus had just fallen a mile or two off, and that if we liked we could see the fighting from a garden over the way. It did not take us long to reach that garden. Sir Gabrielle showed the way, bouncing up the stairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we came out on a grassy terrace full of soldiers. The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near that it was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillside that seemed like any other. But luckily somebody had a field-glass, and with its help a little corner of the battle of Vocoy was suddenly brought close to us. The rush of French infantry up the slopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and high up on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white puffs of the German artillery. Wrap, wrap, wrap, went the answering guns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tongued wood, and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having stumbled on this visible episode of the Great Subterranean Struggle. Though Sir Ronet had seen too many such sights to be much moved, she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarely planted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passing it laughingly about among the soldiers. But as we turned to go, she said, they've sent us word to be ready for another four hundred to-night, and the twinkle died out of her good eyes. Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed, for as we learned, a fortnight later from a three-column communique, the scene we had assisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assault on the high-perched village of Vocoy, a point of the first importance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to the north of Varene, and commanded the railway by which, in September, they had been revictualling and reinforcing their army in the Argonne. Vocoy had been taken by them at the end of September, and thanks to its strong position on a rocky spur, had been almost impregnably fortified. But the attack we looked on at from the Garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28, carried the victorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made them masters of a part of the village. Driven from it again that night, they were to retake it after a five-day struggle of exceptional violence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely established there in a position described as a vital importance to the operations. But what it cost, Sir Gabriel said, when we saw her again a few days later. 2. The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away from Clermont, but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by the sight of the Red Cross over a village house. The house was little more than a hovel, the village, Blaire Courage was called, a mere hamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables, a place so easily overlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there. 3. An orderly went to find the Medecinche, and we waited after him through the mud to one after another of the cottages, in which, with admirable ingenuity, he had managed to create, out of next to nothing, the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance, sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandaged room, a pharmacy, a well-filled woodshed, and a clean kitchen in which Tizane were brewing over a cheerful fire. 4. A detachment of cavalry was quartered in the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a great morass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in the doctor's wake, he told us of the expedience to which he had been put to secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded. It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line of the front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into villages meant to house four or five hundred, and we admired the skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and managed to lodge his patients decently. We came back to the high road, and he asked us if we should like to see the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch the curée was ringing the bell for vespers. We pushed open the inner doors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the nave stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every one lay a soldier—the doctor's worst cases. Few of them wounded, the greater numbers stricken with fever, bronchitis, frostbite, pleurisy, or some other form of trench sickness too severe to permit of their being carried further from the front. One or two heads turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men did not move. The curée meanwhile passing around to the sacristy had come out before the altar in his vestments, followed by a little white acolyte. A handful of women, probably the only civil inhabitants left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots, and the service began. It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was all in monastic shades of black and white and ash and gray, the sick under their earth-colored blankets, their livid faces against the pillows, the black dresses of the women—they seemed all to be in mourning—and the silver haze floating out from the little acolytes' censor. The only light in the scene—the candle gleams on the altar, and their reflection in the embroideries of the curée's chausible—were like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk. For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church, but presently the curée took up in French the canticle of the Sacred Heart, composed during the War of 1870, and the little congregation joined their trembling voices in the refrain, Savez, savez la France, ne l'abandonez pas. The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the nave. Savez, savez la France, the women wailed it near the altar. The soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones, but the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more as the day faded. The church looked like a quiet graveyard in a battlefield. After we had left Saint-Manoude, the sense of the nearness and all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound. Varenne, Le Fort de Paris, Le Bois de la Grewie, were not more than eight or ten miles to the north. Along our own road the stream of motorvans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and more frequent. Once we passed a long line of seventy-fives going single file up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of artillery galloping across a stretch of open country. The movement of supplies was continuous, and every village through which we passed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans, were clustered about the commissariat motors, while hams and quarters of beef were handed out. As we approached Verdun the cannonade had grown louder again, and when we reached the walls of the town and passed under the iron teeth of the portcullis we felt ourselves in one of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense. The desolation of Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of Chalon. The civil population was evacuated in September, and only a small percentage have returned. Nine tents of the shops are closed, and as the troops are nearly all in the trenches there is hardly any movement in the streets. The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed the challenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill to the citadel at the top of the town. Here the military authorities inspect one's papers and deliver a permis de ce jour which must be verified by the police before lodgings can be obtained. The whole atmosphere of the place was different, silent, concentrated, passive. To this chance observer Verdun appears to live only in its hospitals, and of these there are fourteen within the walls alone. As darkness fell the streets became completely deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more incessant. That first night the hush was so intense that every reverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out in the mind its separate vision of destruction, and then, just as the strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo, and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated. On entering the gates the first sight to attract us had been a colony of roughly built bungalows, scattered over the myery slopes of a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the sign, Evacuation Hospital No. 6. The next morning we went to visit it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in charge has covered in with canvas, and divided down its length into a double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots, scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor, and the immense ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In the bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be kept for a time, before being transferred to the hospitals in the town. In one bungalow an operating room has been installed, in another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has been carefully thought out, and intelligently applied by the surgeon in charge, and the enfermière majeure, who indefatigably seconds him. Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour almost, on the dreadful August day, when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers between the railway station and the gate of the little park across the way, and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a hospital may become in skillful and devoted hands. Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them, Saint Nicolas, in a big airy building on the meuse, is an example of a great French military hospital at its best. But I visited few others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the second-lined ambulances beyond the town. The first we went to was in a small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's lines at Cousinroy, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary, muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive, but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere, was for blankets and clean underclothing, for the wounded are brought in from the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without having washed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in these second-lined ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed intelligent and anxious to do the best they could for their men in conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way is the overcrowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers are camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad enough for men in health, and there is also a great need for light diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed on meat and vegetables. In the afternoon we started out again in a snowstorm, over a desolate rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blew fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional cavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed the mournfulness of this depopulated land. We might have been wandering over the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down the steel-grey moose to a village about four miles west of Lésipage, the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going on. There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for the cannon had ceased. But the scene at the point where we left the motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict. The long, straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of cavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into a mud-flat, before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office had been installed, where the motors of the surgeon and the medical inspector who had accompanied us. Nearby stood the usual flock of grey motor vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalry remounts, and riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men. The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had been partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the men lay and rose on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and warm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness to a canal-boat, which had been fitted up with hot douche. The boat was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain of red-flowered chints. Those curtains must do almost as much as the hot water to make over the morale of the men, they were the most comforting sight of the day. Farther north and on the other bank of the Mose lies another large village which has been turned into a colony of a clop—fifteen hundred sick or exhausted men are housed there, and there are no hot douche or chintz curtains to cheer them. We were taken first to the church, a large featureless building at the head of the street. In the doorway our passage was obstructed by a mountain of damp straw which a gang of hostile soldiers were pitchforking out of the aisles. The interior of the church was dim and suffocating. Between the pillars hung screens of plaited straw, forming little enclosures in each of which about a dozen sick men lay on more straw, without mattresses or blankets. No beds, no tables, no chairs, no washing appliances. In their muddy clothes, as they come from the front, they are bedded down on the stone floor like cattle till they are well enough to go back to their job. It was a pitiful contrast to the little church at Blairecourt, with the altar lights twinkling above the clean beds, and one wondered if even so near the front it had to be. The African village, we call it, one of our companions said with a laugh, but the African village has blue sky over it, and a clear stream runs between its mud huts. We had been told at Saint-Manouge that for military reasons we must follow a more southerly direction on our return to Charlemagne, and when we left Verdun we took the road to Bar-le-Duke. It runs south-west over a beautiful broken country, untouched by war except for the fact that its villages, like all the others in this region, are either deserted or occupied by troops. As we left Verdun behind us, the sound of the cannon grew fainter and died out, and we had the feeling that we were gradually passing beyond the flaming boundaries into a more normal world. But suddenly, at a cross-road, a signpost snatched us back to war. SAM YELL 18 KM SAM YELL, the dangerous spot of the region, the weak joint in the armour, there at lay, up that harmless-looking by-road, not much more than ten miles away, a ten-minutes dash would have brought us into the thick of the grey coat and spiked helmets. The shadow of that signpost followed us for miles, darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud. Bar-le-Duke seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was in its normal state of provincial apathy. Few soldiers were about, and here at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days on the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the first sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks instinctively in the eyes of the passers-by for a reflection of that other vision, and feels diminished by contact with people going so indifferently about their business. A little way beyond Bar-le-Duke we came on another phase of the war vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August invasion, and between Bar-le-Duke and Vitry-le-François the high road is lined with ruined towers. The first we came to was Le Mans, a large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it. Then comes Reveny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely leveled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop fronts, handsome doorways, the collinated street of a public building. A few miles farther lies the most piteous of the group, the village of Alsle-Marupt once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped and wounded and dishonored that it lies there by the roadside like a human victim. In this part of the country, which is one of many crossroads, we began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the signposts thrown down, and the enameled plaque on the houses at the entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that this precaution was taken by the inhabitants at the approach of the invading army, another that the Germans themselves demolished the signposts and plastered over the milestones in order to paint on them misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremely bewildering, for all the villages being either in ruins or uninhabited, there is no one to question but the soldiers one meets, and their answer is almost invariably, we don't know, we don't belong here. One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel who knows the name of the village he is guarding. It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris, and to wander as we did for hours across a high, heathery waste, with wide blue distances to north and south, and in all the scene not a landmark by means of which we could make a guess at our whereabouts. One of our haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy by-road, where the long lines of seventy-fives ranged along its banks like gray anteaters in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to a bemired village, swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move. It seems improbable that we were meant to be there, for our arrival caused such surprise that no sentry remembered to challenge us, and obsequiously saluting Sue's officier instantly cleared away for the motor. So, by a happy accident, we caught one more war-picture, all a vehement movement as we passed out of the zone of war. We were still very distinctly in it on returning to Chalon, which, if it had seemed packed on our previous visit, was now quivering and cracking with fresh crowds. The stir about the fountain in the square before the Haute-Merdieu was more melodramatic than ever. Everyone was in a hurry, everyone booted and mud-splashed, and spurred or sordid or dispatch-bagged, and somehow labelled as a member of the huge military beehive. With the privilege of telephoning and telegraphing being denied to civilians in the war-zone, it was ominous to arrive at nightfall on such a crowded scene, and we were not surprised to be told that there was not a room left at the Haute-Merdieu, and that even the sofas in the reading-room had been let for the night. At every other inn in the town we met with the same answer, and finally we decided to ask permission to go on as far as Epernais, about twelve miles off. At headquarters we were told that our request could not be granted. No motors are allowed to circulate after nightfall in the zone of war, and the officer charged with the distribution of motor permits pointed out that, even if an exception were made in our favour, we should probably be turned back by the first sentinel we met, only to find ourselves unable to re-enter Chalon without another permit. This alternative was so alarming that we began to think ourselves relatively lucky to be on the right side of the gates, and we went back to the Haute-Merdieu to squeeze into a crowded corner of the restaurant for dinner. The hope that someone might have suddenly left the hotel in the interval was not realised, but after dinner we learned from the landlady that she had certain rooms permanently reserved for the use of the staff, and that, as these rooms had not yet been called for that evening, we might possibly be allowed to occupy them for the night. At Chalon the headquarters are in the prefecture, a coldly handsome building of the eighteenth century, and there, in a majestic stone vestibule, beneath the gilded ramp of a great festive staircase, we waited in anxious suspense, among the orderlies and estafette, while our unusual request was considered. The result of the deliberation was an expression of regret. Nothing could be done for us, as officers might at any moment arrive from the general headquarters and require the rooms. It was then, past nine o'clock, and bitterly cold, and we began to wonder. Finally the polite officer who had been charged to dismiss us, moved to compassion at our plight, offered to give us a laissez-passe back to Paris. But Paris was about a hundred and twenty-five miles off, the night was dark, the cold was piercing, and at every crossroad and railway crossing a sentinel would have to be convinced of our right to go further. We remembered the warning given us earlier in the evening, and declining the offer went out again into the cold. And just then chance took pity on us. In the restaurant we had run across a friend attached to the staff, and now meeting him again in the depth of our difficulty, we were told of lodgings to be found nearby. He could not take us there, for it was past the hour when he had a right to be out, or we either, for that matter, since curfew sounds at nine in Chalon. But he told us how to find our way through the maze of little unlit streets about the cathedral, standing there beside the motor in the icy darkness of the deserted square, and whispering hastily as he turned to leave us. You ought not to be out so late. But the word tonight is Gina. When you give it to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you. With that he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe that I was I, or Chalon, Chalon, or that a young man who in Paris drops in to dine with me and talk over new books and plays, had been whispering a password in my ear to carry me unchallenged to a house a few streets away. The sense of unreality produced by that one word was so overwhelming, that, for a blissful moment, the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as they used to be. The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade at Verdun. And when we went out into the streets, it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground. Waylaid at one corner after another by the long tide of troops streaming out through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the various divisions of the unfolding frieze. First the infantry and artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and ammunition, then the long line of gray supply wagons, and finally the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All the story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that endless, silent flow to the front. And we were to read it again, a few days later, in the terse announcement of renewed activity about sweep, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between Pert and Beaujour. FIGHTING FRANCE From Dunn-Kirk to Belfort by Edith Wharton CHAPTER III. IN LORENNE AND THE VUGE Nulsi. May 13th, 1915. Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly, round-faced, pink peonies of the village garden. They were picked this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gérb-Viet, a house so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough to fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating over the fall of a city of idolaters. Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out in its last writhings, and before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point to the stale allegory of unconscious nature veiling man's havoc. They are put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy, coming back to replant and rebuild the wilderness. Last March in the Argonne the towns we passed through seemed quite dead, but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We were following another track of the invasion, one of the huge tiger scratches that the beast flung over the land last September, between Vitry-Refrançois and Bar-le-Duc. Etropie, Parnie, Cermès-les-Bains, and Arnais are the names of this group of victims. Cermès, a pretty watering place along wooded slopes, the other's large villages, fringed with farms, and all now mere scrophilous blotches on the soft spring scene. But in many we heard the sound of hammers, and saw bricklayers and masons at work. Even in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life—children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautious older face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins. In one place an ancient tram-car had been converted into a café and labelled, Au restaurant des ruines, and everywhere between the cows and walls the carefully combed gardens aligned their radishes and lettuce-tops. From Bar-le-Duc returned northeast, and as we entered the forest of Comercie we began to hear again the voice of the front. It was the warmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where we stopped for luncheon the familiar boom broke with a magnified loudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashes there was not a sound, but the gnats hum in the moist sunshine, and the dryad call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of the lane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their horses flanks glinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept some cigarettes, and when they had trotted off again the gnat, the cuckoo, and the cannon took up their trio. The town of Comercie looked so undisturbed that the cannon-odd rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These frontier towns, enured to the clash of war, go about their business with what one might call stolidity if they were not finer and truer names for it. In Comercie, to be sure there is little business to go about just now, save that connected with the military occupation. But the peaceful look of the sunny, sleepy streets made one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away. Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race vanity, still persist in speaking of themselves as a nervous and impressionable people. This afternoon, on the road to Gervier, we were again in the track of the September invasion. Overall the slopes now cool with spring foliage, the battle rocked backward and forward during those burning autumn days, and every mile of the struggle has left its ghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which the plowshare makes a circuit to avoid. Many of the villages have been partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweet leafiness, is so alive with plowing and sowing and all the natural tasks of spring that the war scars seem like traces of a long past woe, and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of Gervier that we breathed again the choking air of present horror. Gervier, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the mirth, must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted up between scattered houses and gardens to the great Louis Quator's chateau above the town and the church that balanced it. So much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley, but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos. Gervier has taken to herself the title of the Martyrtown, an honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim. But as a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado, and it fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction was no accident of nature, but a piously planned and methodically executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress. Then, when the Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the nicely timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the fearless Teuton carries about for his land, Lusitanias, was tossed on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders, almost apologetically for German thoroughness, that any of the human rats escaped from their holes. But some did, and were neatly spitted on lurking bayonets. One old woman, hearing her son's death cry, rashly looked out of her door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her flocks and lilies, and there in her little garden her dead body was dishonoured. It seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a blackened doorway the sign Monument Funèbre, and to observe that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of a lane called La Ruelle des Orphalines. At one end of the main street of Gervier there once stood a charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door, deep roof, and ample gables. It was in the garden of this house that my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Ligege, a former mayor of Gervier, who witnessed all the horrors of the invasion. Mr. Ligege is now living in a neighbour's cellar, his own being fully occupied by the debris of his charming house. He told us the story of the three days of the German occupation, how he and his wife and niece, and the niece's babies, took to their cellar while the Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a door into the stable yard, they saw that the soldiers suspected they were within, and were trying to get at them. Luckily the incendiaries had heaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and the blaze was so hot that they could not reach the door. Between the arch of the doorway and the door itself was a half-moon opening, and Mr. Ligege and his family, during three days and three nights, broke up all the barrels in the cellar, and threw the bits out through the opening to feed the fire in the yard. Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that the ruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash for safety. The house was on the edge of the town, and the women and children managed to get away into the country. But Mr. Ligege was surprised in his garden by a German soldier. He made a rush for the high wall of the adjoining cemetery, and scrambling over it slipped down between the wall and a big granite cross. The cross was covered with the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners, and with these opportune mementos Mr. Ligege roofed himself in, lying wedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon till night, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were hunting for him among the gravestones. Luckily it was their last day at Gérb-Vier, and the German retreat saved his life. Even in Gérb-Vier we saw no worse scene of destruction than the particular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story. He looked about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contorted iron. This was my dining-room, he said. There were some good old paneling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been a wedding-present for my grandfather. He led us into another black pit. This was our sitting-room. You see what a view we had! He sighed and added philosophically. I suppose we were too well off. I even had an electric light out there on the terrace to read my paper by on summer evenings. Yes, we were too well off. That was all. Meanwhile all the town had been read with horror, flame and shot and tortures unnameable, and at the other end of the long street, a woman, a sister of charity, had held her own like Serge-Abriel at Clermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children about her, and interposing her short stout figure between them and the fury of the Germans. We found her in her hospice, a ruddy, indomitable woman who related with a quick indignation more thrilling than invective, the hideous details of the bloody three days. But that already belongs to the past, and at present she is much more concerned with the task of clothing and feeding Gervier. For two-thirds of the population have already come home. That is what they call the return to this desert. You see, Sir Julie explained, there are the crops to sow, the gardens to tend, they had to come back, the government is building wooden shelters for them, and people will surely send us beds and linen. Of course they would, one felt as one listened. Heavy boots, too, boots for field labourers. We want them for women as well as men, like these. Sir Julie, smiling, turned up a hobnailed soul. I have directed all the work on our hospice farm myself. All the women are working in the fields. We must take the place of the men. And I seem to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints of her sturdy boots. May 14th Nolsi, the most beautiful town in France, has never been as beautiful as now. Coming back to it last evening from a round of ruins, one felt as if the humbler sisters' sacrifice to spare it were pleading with one not forget them in the contemplation of its dearly bought perfection. The last time I looked out on the great architectural setting of the Place Stanislas was on a hot July evening, the evening of the national fete. The square and the avenues leading to it swarmed with people, and as darkness fell the balanced lines of arches and palaces sprang out in many-coloured light. Garlands of lamps looped the arcades leading into the Place de la Carrière. Peacock-coloured fires flared from the Arch of Triumph. Long curves of radiance beat like wings over the thickets of the park, the sculptures of the fountains, the brown and gold foliation of Jean d'Amour's Great Gates, and under this roofing of light was the murmur of a happy crowd carelessly celebrating the tradition of half-forgotten victories. Now at sunset, all life ceases in Nancy, and veil after veil of silence comes down on the deserted Place and its empty perspectives. Last night by night the few lingering lights and the streets had been put out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over the city like a canopy of velvet. Then from some remote point the arc of a searchlight swept the sky, laid a fugitive pallor on darkened palace fronts, a gleam of gold on invisible gates, trembled across the black vault and vanished, leaving it still blacker. When we came out of the darkened restaurant on the corner of the square, and the iron curtain of the entrance had been hastily dropped on us, we stood in such complete night that it took a waiter's friendly hand to guide us to the curb-stone. Then, as we grew used to the darkness, we saw it lying still more densely under the colonnade of the Place de la Carrière, and the clipped trees beyond. The ordered masses of architecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and the black sky faintly strewn with stars seemed to overarch an enchanted city. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of air drew under the arches, and suddenly, through the dumb night, the sound of the cannon began. May 14. Lunch in with the general staff in an old bourgeois house of a little town, as sleepy as Cranford. In the warm-walled gardens, everything was blooming at once—liburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn, benxia roses, and all the pleasant border plants that go with box and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring whirl-call with such a rush. Upstairs in the empire bedroom which the general has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench-plans, airplane photographs, and all the documentation of modern war. Through the windows, bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life. We started early for Mousson, on the Moselle, the ruined hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its foot. Our road ran below the long range of the Grand Courant, the line of hills curving southeast from Ponte-à-Mousson to Saint-Nicolas-du-Port. All through this pleasant broken country the battle shook and swayed last autumn, but few signs of those days are left except the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible, and the pictures of war that made the Argonzo tragic last March are replaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson, the road is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a hill-top. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German invasion was finally checked and flung back, and the Muse of History points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft inscribed. Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic hordes. A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bit of rising ground. The road is raked by the German lines, and stray pedestrians, unless in a group, are less liable than a motor to have a shell spent on them. We climbed under a driving-grace sky which swept gusts of rain across our road. In the lee of the castle we stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs of Ponte à Mousson, and the broken bridge which once linked together the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of the bridge showed that we were on the edge of war. The wind was too high for firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood just beyond the hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenches and bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valley the eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared. But there the Germans were, drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watchtower, and as one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls one gradually found oneself reliving the sensations of the little medieval burg as it looked out on some earlier circle of besiegers. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became. There they are, and there, and there. We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades. Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with crisscross ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp. Suddenly an officer pointing to the west of the trenched hill said, Do you see that farm? It lay just below, near the river, and so close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals in the farmyard if there had been any, but the whole place seemed to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. They are there, the officer said, and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest cannonade had not made them seem as real as that. At this point the military lined and the old political frontier everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal the German batteries we saw a dark gray blur on the gray horizon. It was Mets, the promised city, lying there with its fair steeples and towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky. Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the river and entered Pante-Mousson. It was by mere meteorological good luck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the guns would have been awake, and when they wake poor Pante-Mousson is not at home to visitors. One understood why, as one stood in the riverside garden of the great premonstrotency in monastery, which is now the hospital and the general asylum of the town. Between the clipped limes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out three or four dreadful hollows, in one of which only last week a little girl found her death, and the façade of the building is pockmarked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes. Yet in this precarious shelter, Sister Teresia, of the same indomitable breed as the sisters of Clermont and Gervier, has gathered a miscellaneous flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by the bombardment, éclope, old women and children—all the human wreckage of this storm-beaten point of the front. Sister Teresia seems in no wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over her roof. The building is immense and spreading, and when one wing is damaged she picks up her protégé and trots them off, bed and baggage to another. Je promène mes malades," she said calmly, as if boasting of the very accommodation of an ultramodern hospital as she led us through vaulted and stuck-out galleries, where cariotted saints looked down and plastered pomp on the rows of brown blanketed pallets and the long tables at which haggard éclope were enjoying their evening soup. May fifteenth. I have seen the happiest being on earth, a man who has found his job. This afternoon we motored south-west of Nancy to a little place called Manille-sur-Belvit. The name is not yet intimately known to history, but there are reasons why it deserves to be, and in one man's mind it already is. Manille-sur-Belvit is a village on the edge of the Vodge. It is badly battered, for awful fighting took place there in the first month of the war. The houses lie in hollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into a plateau, waving with wheat and backed with wooded slopes—the ideal battleground of the history books. And here a real above-ground battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampled wheat. The church of Manille is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands, a plain little house at the end of the street, and here the cuiré received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a chapel. The chapel is also a war-museum, and everything in it has something to do with the battle that took place among the wheat fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of seventy-five shells. The Virgin's halo is composed of radiating bayonets. The walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French relics, and on the ceiling the cuiré has had painted a kind of zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Manille-sur-Belvit, handful of houses, figures as the central orb of the system, and Verdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites. But the chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the cuiré's impassioned dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the battlefield, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically disposed, planted with flowers and young furs, and marked by the names and death dates of the fallen. As he led us from one of these enclosures to another, his face was lit with the flame of a gratified vacation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing. He is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall of the Presbytere hangs a case of carefully mounted butterflies, the result no doubt of an earlier passion for collecting. His specimens have changed, that is all. He is passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary psyche. On the way to Minule we stopped at the village of Crevique. The Germans were there in August, but the place is untouched, except for one house. That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of the village, was the birth-place and home of General Lyotet, one of France's best soldiers, and Germany's worst enemy in Africa. It is no exaggeration to say that last August General Lyotet, by his promptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France. The Germans know it, and hate him. And as soon as the first soldiers reached Crevique, so obscure and imperceptible a spot that even German omniscience might have missed it, the officer in command, asked for General Lyotet's house, went straight to it, had all the papers, portraits, furniture, and family relics piled in a bonfire in the court, and then burnt down the house. As we sat in the neglected park, with the plaintive ruin before us, we heard from the gardener this typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry. It is corroborated by the fact that not another house in Crevique was destroyed. May 16th. About two miles from the German frontier—frontier, just here, as well as front—an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows. East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon is the boundary between empire and republic. On such a clear day as this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the east for the danger speck, and the circumference of the hill is furrowed by a deep trench—a bowel, rather—winding invisibly from one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these earthly warrants, ingeniously waddled, roofed, and iron-sheeted, stand two or three artillery officers with keen, quiet faces, directing by telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four or five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who lived there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different classes, and had received a different social education, but their mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French faces—a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will, and sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the vanishing point of the great perspective. From this vigilant height, one of the intentest eyes open on the frontier, we went a short distance down the hillside to a village out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and puppies. Below the terrace, lost Lorraine, stretched away to her blue heights, a vision of summer peace, and just above us the unsleeping hill kept watch, its signal wires trembling night and day. It was one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves. Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a dark blur in our bird's eye view of the plain. We passed into the forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched and sodded and leafy, that they seemed like some transition form between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called Village Negre, of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements to which the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. This particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep winding bowels over which light rustic bridges have been thrown, and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real doors and windows under their grass eaves, real furniture inside, and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long trestle-tapels under the trees, tired, unshaven men and shabby uniforms of all cuts, and almost every colour. They were off-duty, relaxed, in good humour, but every face had the look of the faces watching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the front, I have the same impression—the impression that the absorbing, undivided thought of the defence of France lives in the heart and brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of their chief. We walked a dozen yards down the road, and came to the edge of the forest. A waddled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet village a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field, and was abruptly pulled back. Take care! Those are the trenches. What looked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line, and in the quiet village French cannon watched. Suddenly as we stood there they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakable grrr of an airplane, and saw a bird of evil high up against the blue. Snap! Snap! Snap! barked the mitraeuses on the hill. The soldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through the trees, and the tobe, finding itself the centre of so much attention, turned grey-tail and swished away to the concealing clouds. May 17th. Today we started with an intense sense of adventure. Hitherto we had always been told beforehand where we were going, and how much we were to be allowed to see, but now we were being launched into the unknown. Beyond a certain point all was conjecture. We knew only that what happened after that would depend on the goodwill of a colonel of Chaussure-à-Pierre, who we were to go a long way to find, up into the folds of the mountains on our southeast horizon. We picked up a staff officer at headquarters, and flew on to a battered town on the edge of the hills. From there we wound up through a narrowing valley, under wooded cliffs, to a little settlement where the colonel of the brigade was to be found. There was a short conference between the colonel and our staff officer, and then we annexed a captain of Chaussure, and spun away again. Our road lay through a town so exposed, the dark companion from headquarters suggested the advisability of avoiding it. But our guide hadn't the heart to inflict such a disappointment on his new acquaintances. Oh! we won't stop the motor, we'll just dash through," he said indulgently, and in the excess of his indulgence he even permitted us to dash slowly. Oh! that poor town! When we reached it, along a road plowed with fresh obisoles, I didn't want to stop the motor. I wanted to hurry on and blot the picture from my memory. It was doubly sad to look at, because of the fact that it wasn't quite dead, faint spasms of life still quivered through it. A few children played in the ravaged streets. A few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways. They oughtn't to be here, our guide explained. But about a hundred and fifty begged so hard to stay that the general gave them leave. The officer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives the signal they dive down into their burrows. He says they are perfectly obedient. It was he who asked that they might stay. Up and up into the hills. The vision of human pain and ruin was lost in beauty. We were among the furs, and the air was full of balm. The mossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little waterfalls from the heights set the branches trembling over secret pools. At each turn of the road, forest and always more forest climbing with us as we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys that converged on slate blue distances. At one of these turns we overtook a company of soldiers, spade on shoulder, and bags of tools across their backs, trench workers swinging up to the heights to which we were bound. Life must be a better thing in this crystal air than in the mud-welter of the argon and the fogs of the north, and these men's faces were fresh with wind and weather. Higher still, and presently a halt on a ridge in another black village, this time almost a town. The soldiers gathered round us as the motor stopped, throngs of Chaussure-à-Pierre in faded, trench-stained uniforms, for few visitors climbed to this point, and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presently expressed in a large, Vive la Merique!—scrawled on the door of the car. La Merique was glad and proud to be there, and instantly conscious of breathing and air saturated with courage, and the dogged determination to endure. The men were all reservists, that is to say, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age. For many months there has not been much active work along this front. No great adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination. It has just been months after month of monotonous watching and holding on. And the soldiers' faces showed it. There was no light of heady enterprise in their eyes, but the look of men who knew their job, had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France till the day of victory. Meanwhile, they had made the best of the situation, and turned their quarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy. Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yet seen. In the Colonel's dugout, a long table decked with lilacs and tulips was spread for tea. In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling saucepans over kitchen fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp furniture and household decoration. Farther down the road, a path between furbows led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon, a soldier came in from the trenches, an elderly bearded man with a good, average civilian face, the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd. He had a scalp wound which had just been dressed, and was very pale. The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then, turning to him, said, Yes, sir. Good! In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to the trenches, eh? I'm going now, sir. It was said quite simply, and received in the same way. Oh, all right! the Colonel merely rejoined, but he laid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out. Our next visit was to a sawed-thatched hut, at the sign of the Ambulant Artisans, where two or three soldiers were modelling and chiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells. One of the Ambulant Artisans was just finishing a ring with beautifully modelled fawn's heads, another offered me a pickle-hobe small enough for mustard-seeds wear, but complete in every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an imperial fending. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste. But the two we visited happened to be parish jewelers, for whom Artisan was really too modest to pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a red gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed to be beating out the cheerful rhythm of, I too will something make, and joy in the making. Up the hillside and deeper shadow was another little structure, a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers. Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fur-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral forest. Nearby was the graveyard, where day by day these quiet, elderly men lay their comrades, the pair de famille who don't go back. The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favorite comrade goes, the men's scorning ephemeral tributes club together to buy a monstrous, indestructible wreath with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, and many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves. It's their favorite walk at this hour, the Colonel said. He stopped to look down on a grave smothered in beady tokens, the grave of the last pal to fall. He was mentioned in the order of the day, the Colonel explained, and the group of soldiers standing near looked at us proudly, as if sharing their comrade's honor and wanting to be sure of what we understood the reason of their pride. And now, said our Captain of Chaussure, that you've seen the second-line trenches, what do you say to taking a look at the first? We followed him to a point higher up the hill, where we plunged into a deep ditch of red earth, the bowel leading to the first lines. It climbed still higher, under the wet furs, and then turning, dipped over the edge, and began to wind in sharp loops down the other side of the ridge. Down we scrambled, single file, our chins on a level with the top of the passage, the close green covert above us. The bowel went twisting down more and more sharply into a deep ravine, and presently at a bend we came to a fur-thatched outlook, where soldier stood with his back to us, his eye glued to a peephole in the waddled wall. Another turn, and another outlook. But here it was the iron-rimmed eye of the Mitraillers that stared across the ravine. By this time we were within a hundred yards or so of the German lines, hidden like hours on the other side of the narrowing hollow, and as we stole down and down, the hush and secrecy of the scene, and a sense of that imminent, lurking hatred only a few branch lengths away, seemed to fill the silence with mysterious pulsations. Suddenly a sharp noise broke on them, the rap of a rifle shot against a tree-trunk a few yards ahead. Ah! the sharpshooter! said our guide. No more talking, please. He's over there, in a tree somewhere, and whenever he hears voices he fires. Someday we shall spot his tree. We went on in silence to a point where a few soldiers were sitting on a ledge of rock and a widening of the bowel. They looked as quiet as if they'd been waiting for their box before a boulevard café. Not beyond, please, said the officer, holding me back, and I stopped. Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines. The knowledge made one's heart tick a little, but except for another shot or two from our arboreal listener and the motionless intentness of the soldiers back at the peephole, there was nothing to show that we were not a dozen miles away. Perhaps the thought occurred to our captain of Chasseur. For just as I was turning back, he said, with his friendliest twinkle, do you want awfully to go a little farther? Well, then, come on. We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down and down, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine. The sharpshooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafy silence but an intermittent drop of rain. We were at the end of the borough, and the captain signed to me that I might take a cautious peep round its corner. I looked out, and saw a strip of intensely green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on its either side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with them, and a few steps would have carried us across the interval, yet all about us was silence and the peace of the forest. Again, for a minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate. Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myself in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled earth. We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the bowel. We passed the lulling soldiers, the silent mitraeus. We came again at the watcher at his peephole. He heard us, let the officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of understanding. Do you want to look down? He moved a step away from his window, the lookout projected over the ravine, making its depths, and here with one's eye to the leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last, saw at the bottom of the harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a gray uniform huddled in a dead heap. He's been there for days. They can't fetch him away," said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole, and it was almost a relief to find it was, after all, a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow. The sun had set when we got back to our starting point in the underground village. The Chausserapiers were lounging along the roadside and standing and gossiping groups about the motor. It was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life they had left nearly a year earlier, and had not been allowed to go back to for a day. And under all their jokes and good humour their farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality, the business of holding their bit of France. It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's single-mindedness is so strong and all who have had even a glimpse of the front. Perhaps it has gathered less from what the men say than from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting cigarettes and exchanging trench jokes, the look is there. And when one comes on them unaware it is there also. In the dusk of the forest that look followed us down the mountain, and as we skirted the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on the near side the men who had been made by it.