reserve companies stationed in the rear. For a moment there was something of a panic. The colors of the regiment were lost in the Mortagne, their bearer being drowned, but a private plunged in after them and brought them back to land.

Then the men rallied and reformed along the line of trenches whence they had started that morning. It'seemed that all their dash and courage had been wasted. But, in point of fact, the enemy had been utterly demoralized, and later, when the division engaged had been relieved by another division, made no attempt to defend the position. So that after all something had been achieved by this terrible loss of life.

One of the characteristics of fighting in Lorraine is the invisibility of the troops engaged. At one point we were less than three miles from the enemy's lines. Our motors had been left under the crest of a hill for fear of attracting the enemy's fire. Along the crest of the hill itself ran the second line of the French trenches, looking very cold and uninviting, half full of frozen water. On the left the trench ran down into a little valley and up again on the further side like a brown scar on the hill-side, and on the right it disappeared in a dense wood.

Straight ahead in the foreground was a little village clustered on a slope. It had suffered little from shell fire, as the projectiles of both sides generally passed over it, but it could only be revictualled at night for fear of attracting the enemy's fire. Guns were booming away steadily in the distance, but apart from this sound it would be hard to imagine a more peaceful scene. The whole countryside was desolate as only the French country can be. Apart from our own party, the only sign of life in sight appeared to be a sentry and a country cart lumbering along towards us. The

sentry, as he stood, muffled up to the eyes, beside a rough shelter made of branches which marked the beginning of the first line of defence, looked in his dark blue uniform against the snowcovered fields as though he had stepped out of a picture by Meissonier.

The cart seemed as peaceful as a farm cart can seem, and at the first glance one did not notice that its carters were soldiers and that it was carrying a wounded man to the rear. In that district there was one man and more to every square rod, and yet these were the only living beings in sight.

In the background, on a hill that marks the further bank of the Seille, the frontier river, stood a long low red farm-house. At first sight there was nothing to distinguish it from any other farm-house, but a word from an officer had the power to give it a special interest of its own. It marked the position of the German outposts. Through the glasses we could distinguish the brown lines of the German trenches cut in the slopes below it and, for an instant, a black figure of a sentry, which immediately after disappeared. No doubt he thought our party unworthy of his attention.

The guns were booming on either side and these were all the visible signs of war, unless one might count gray wreaths of smoke that floated lightly above the forest.

Instinctively one's mind went back to the tales of Iroquois and Sioux, of Hawkeye and the last of the Mohicans. The woods were full of men armed to the teeth and seeking one another's lives, but there was nothing to betray their presence, no sign except the thin smoke that clung to the tree-tops, no sound except the distant thunder of the guns.

Over yonder on the further side of the Seille valley the smoke was rising from German camp-fires, nearer it be

trayed the huts where the French were cooking their evening meal.

Trapper and Indian, when in days gone by they hid their trail so cunningly and vied with one another in the art of invisibility, had no fear of observation from above. The sky was still the birthright of the birds, and man had no part in it to make war from the clouds. So that if their tracks and their camp were hidden from the sight of those who walked on the ground like themselves, they had achieved their end. But to-day a new instinct is being developed. The soldier when he has found shelter must feel instinctively whether he is hidden not only from eyes on a level with his own, but also from those of the aviator who glides far above, like Chil the kite in the jungle-book, waiting and watching for things to die.

If but a glimpse is given to the watcher above, a signal follows, and in an instant the secret refuge has be come the target of every gun within range.

The ingenuity with which men and guns are hidden passes description. In the forest one may catch a glimpse of little huts, like the wood-cutter's cottage of a fairy-tale, thatched with oak branches to which the shrivelled leaves are still clinging so that the sharpest eye might pass them by in the winter brown of the undergrowth. The one touch of color I noticed was given by a hut of bright green canvas which had obviously been built to match the luxuriant summer foliage.

The guns are concealed with even greater cunning. The wind was cruel, driving before it a few flakes of frozen snow, when we set out in quest of a battery on a certain shell-torn plateau. We struggled on as best we could across the rough waste ground, threading our way through the countless pits opened in the stony soil by German shells. Then when we had

scrambled over a deep-cut communication trench, the Staff Officer who was guiding us suddenly admitted that he was at a loss.

"I have been to this battery three times," he said, "and each time I have had a regular hunt for it. Even now I do not feel sure that we are right. If it is not over there, I do not know where it is."

As he spoke, he pointed to some uninviting hummocks on our right, sparsely covered with snow. There was nothing about them to suggest that they differed in any way from other mounds that we had climbed over or skirted round, but hoping for the best we pushed on towards them with the wind beating in our faces. It was only when we came right up to them that we discovered that there really was something strange about them. It is not usual for a little hill to have a front door to it, even if that front door is so cunningly made of brushwood hurdles that it can scarcely be distinguished from the tangled grass and brambles round it. Such a door should lead to the haunts of gnomes and of the little people who live underground, and one felt a certain sense of impropriety when our major tapped sharply upon it instead of pronouncing some mysterious open sesame. The door swung back promptly on its clumsy leather hinges, and there peered out of the opening in the side of the mound a face so bristling with hair that, but for the képi, it might have belonged to some treasureguarding gnome.

Bending low the major plunged underground and we followed him, stumbling down a flight of clumsy steps to find ourselves in a gun emplacement surrounded by half a dozen reservists, all equally cheerful and all equally deserving of their pet name of "poilu." The burrow was lighted by a gap in the upper world some eight

feet long by three feet broad. Through this gap the workmanlike muzzle of an evil-looking field gun was contemplating the melancholy prospect: in the foreground a few yards of rising ground, then the bare top-branches of a tree showing over the crest of the hill, and beyond nothing but gray winddriven snow-clouds. Rarely or never has the modern artilleryman the satisfaction of seeing his target.

They were by no means uncomfortable quarters, sheltered and warm on that bleak wind-swept plateau. The gun was buried some six feet below the surface, and the earth above it was propped up by a network of beams and planks. Still more cosy were the sleeping quarters some twelve feet lower. To reach them one plunged down a narrow dark hole and, after knocking one's head against the beams of the roof more or less violently in the darkness, clambered down a tenfoot ladder. The whole descent recalled Alice's plunge into the White Rabbit's burrow which led to Wonderland. At the foot of the ladder there was a subterranean passage which turned sharply to the left into a little cave where there was room for a dozen men to curl themselves up in the straw. The stuffiness of the atmosphere was distinctly pleasant after the bitter cold of the air outside, and two men awakened by our sudden ap parition grunted out a sleepy welcome. The largest shell might have burst in the ground immediately above their heads without waking them SO effectually.

The other guns of the battery were similarly concealed and defied detection from any quarter. The German air-scouts had hunted for them again and again, but never had the keenesteyed observer succeeded in locating their position.

To the Parisian the German aeroplane has become a comparatively fa

miliar object. There is something more aggravating than alarming in the appearance of the mosquito-like craft sailing serenly over the city with the evening sun painting colors on its wings. It seems in another world, and even the crashing detonations of the bombs which it drops into neighboring streets fail to bring home its relation to the crowd of upturned faces in the Boulevard below.

We passed under an Aviatik when we were driving from Nancy to Lunéville, and the impression it produced was very different from that produced by a Taube over Paris. Though it was flying very high the warning black cross beneath its wings was clearly visible, and as its planes shivered a little in the varying breeze, it seemed a hawk hovering over its prey. It looked evil and merciless enough, but there in the open country there was nothing to shock the spirit of fairplay as there had been in Paris. From a hill near by there came a little sputter of musketry just as we had heard in the city streets and the Aviatik flew on, evidently thinking our party unworthy of its attention.

Later we discovered that this particular "bird of evil" had no more common sense or idea of fair-play than the aeroplanes which killed women and children in Paris. It had dropped half a dozen purposeless bombs on Lunéville, and if it did not kill any non-combatant, that was certainly not its fault. As for its moral effect, an old lady of the town told me exactly how she felt about it at a teaparty that afternoon. "We are so accustomed to their aeroplanes," she said, "that we do not trouble to look at them, and as for their bombs I assure you that they really do not startle me so much as the horrible noise that the shopkeepers make every evening when they pull down their iron shutters."

Life in such towns as Lunéville only a few miles from the Germans is almost normal. On the eastern frontier the memories of 1870 have never been forgotten, and occupation by a brutal invader, an idea that to the English mind is almost inconceivable, is remembered as a matter of experience just as any other unpleasant event might be. The Germans had come and had been driven away never to return; this fact is quite enough for the inhabitants of Lorraine. Kindly invited to tea by the mayor of Lunéville we found ourselves in the midst of a gay gathering which differed in no way from a similar function in time of peace, except that military uniforms predominated over civilian clothes. While the tea-cups went round and, in French fashion, glasses of champagne were served, people talked of the German inroad which was only a few weeks old in the detached fashion in which people in England might talk of atrocities in China or the Balkans. The mayor told us quite simply how he had demanded an apology for acts of unspeakable barbarity and the punishment of the guilty soldiers from a new German governor of the town. The general replied that none of his men would dare to be such brutes; the soldiers responsible belonged to another army corps and for them he could not be responsible, but while he was there he would see to it that the inhabitants of Lunéville were properly treated. The mayor, who was held as a hostage and was quite prepared to be shot out of hand, consented to accept this assurance. "I hesitated," he said, "when the Boche held out his hand, but I decided to take it; for what he said was true and while he was governor here there were no atrocities." The story was told in the same unemotional tone which the mayor's wife used when she described how her

husband was taken away and shut up for days in the town-hall as a hostage, while perforce she entertained the entire German staff in her historic house where the treaty of Lunéville was signed.

Even so close behind the lines there is no scarcity of provisions or even of luxuries. At luncheon near the front such a meal was set before us as could not be surpassed in the most famous restaurants of Paris. The table was decorated with carnations that could only have come from the Riviera coast, and on the menu there figured Marennes oysters and lobsters which in some mysterious way had been brought up absolutely fresh from the sea over railway lines that were presumably strained to the utmost under the burden of providing necessities and ammunition for the Army.

We were able to convince ourselves of the admirable way in which the French soldier is fed by a surprise visit to the kitchen of a reservist regiment in a small village near the firing line. In a large barn three great fires were blazing cheerfully, and over each of them hung a number of large pots from which savory odors were steaming. The regimental cooks, one of whom in civilian life was the chef of a well-known restaurant, invited us to taste the soup and meat which they were cooking, and to appreciate them the hunger of the trenches was not needed as a sauce. The reservists gathered round the fires in a merry group exchanging with their officers that respectful chaff which the splenaid camaraderie of the French Army allows. The only suggestion that they could make for the improvement of their rations was that their daily allowance of wine might be increased.

They are splendid men, the reservists who saved Nancy, the town that, according to the military experts, was doomed to fall in the first few days

of war. As reckless and dashing as the men of the active army when occasion demands, they possess a steadiness and power of endurance which is proof against every trial. Pères de famille as most of them are, they positively seem to enjoy the hardships of campaigning, and it would be difficult to find a more cheerful and healthy-looking body of men. They are not smart as Englishmen understand smartness. It is almost a point of honor with them to deserve the name of "poilu" by eschewing the razor as religiously as a Nazarite. You may find them on a shelterless plateau in a raging blizzard busy about the trenches and the wire entanglements or, more trying still, waiting monotonously to be relieved; yet there is always a smile on their bearded faces and they have always a joke and a cheery word ready to defy the elements and the enemy.

I heard their virtues extolled on an occasion not lightly to be forgotten. We were standing in the churchyard of the little village of Ste. Geneviève, the northernmost point of the Grand Couronné. Beneath our feet ran the Moselle: on its left bank one could distinguish perpetually-bombarded Pont à Mousson, and behind it the forest of Bois le Prêtre from which there came a continuous thunder of artillery. On the right bank rose the precipitous hill of Mousson, like the back of a huge whale, crowned with the ruins of a church where one of the batteries that bombarded Ste. Geneviève had been posted, and round its base ran the semicircle of the forest of Facq, extending to the foot of the hill on which we were standing. If only the snow-clouds had lifted, we should have seen on the horizon the great German fortress of Metz.

The steady boom of distant guns made the wrecked churchyard and the ruined village round it seem even more

silent and desolate; the deep voice of the colonel who told us the heroic story and the wailing of the wind blended with the far-away clamor of war. Despite that clamor the country-side seemed very quiet and peaceful under its mantle of snow, and it was hard to imagine the inferno of fire and steel that it had been a few months before. Ste. Geneviève had been exposed to a cross-fire and there is little of it left. The houses are all fire-gutted and in ruins. Through a great breach in the church wall one can see a wild confusion of tangled beams and masonry, and above it a crucifix, the one thing that remains intact. Was it the eye of fancy that discerned a look of wonder at the surrounding ruin on the Saviour's patient face? Grave-stones had been uprooted and shattered by German shell, and an old yew tree which had braved time and storm for centuries had in a second been rent asunder.

The colonel was one of those splendid French soldiers to whom war is as the very breath of their nostrils, and as he stood up erect against the wind he took a positive pleasure in battling with the elements. "J'aime la guerre," he said, "it is my profession. It is natural that I should love it." He had been a major when the Germans made their onslaught on Ste. Geneviève and had earned promotion on the battle-field.

"You should have seen my men," he said, "at the critical moment when we were being bombarded from both sides. The German artillery on the further bank of the Moselle was taking us on the flank, and in front their heavy guns were pounding away at us from the vantage point of the hill of Mousson where they were posted just behind the crest. It seemed that nothing could live under that avalanche of flame. But our men stuck fast to their trenches, and we