feeding
bread crumbs to the seven stately swans. Instead he was responsible for
the lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. His duties were to
feed the men three times a day with food, and all day and night with
ammunition, to guard them against attacks from gases, burning oil,
bullets, shells; and in counter-attack to send them forward with the
bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to distribute death. These were only
a few of his responsibilities.

[Illustration: The ruined village of Gerbeviller, destroyed after
their retreat by the Germans.

Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr.
Davis.]

I knew somewhere in the chateau there must be the conning-tower from
which the general directed his armies, and after luncheon asked to be
allowed to visit it. It was filled with maps, in size enormous but rich
in tiny details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls, spread over
vast drawing-boards. But to the visitor more marvellous than the maps
showing the French lines were those in which were set forth the German
positions, marked with the place occupied by each unit, giving the exact
situation of the German trenches, the German batteries, giving the
numerals of each regiment. With these spread before him, the general has
only to lift the hand telephone, and direct that from a spot on a map
on one wall several tons of explosive shells shall drop on a spot on
another map on the wall opposite. The general does not fight only at
long distance from a map. Each morning he visits some part of the fifty
miles of trenches. What later he sees on his map only jogs his memory.
It is a sort of shorthand note. Where to you are waving lines, dots, and
crosses, he beholds valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A week
ago, during a bombardment, a brother general advanced into the first
trench. His chief of staff tugged at his cloak.

"My men like to see me here," said the general.

A shell killed him. But who can protest it was a life wasted? He made it
possible for every _poilu_ in a trench of five hundred miles to say:
"Our generals do not send us where they will not go themselves."

We left the white swans smoothing their feathers, and through rain drove
to a hill covered closely with small trees. The trees were small,
because the soil from which they drew sustenance was only one to three
feet deep. Beneath that was chalk. Through these woods was cut a runway
for a toy railroad. It possessed