erican officers just as we were being told
for the third time that there was no room in the hotel to which we had
driven up. Should we really have to sleep in the car? There seemed to
be not a single vacant bedroom in Nancy; and there had been snow
showers during the day! But these two Americans heard from our French
Lieutenant that there were two English ladies in the car, and they
came forward at once, offering their rooms. Luckily we found shelter
elsewhere; but I shall not soon forget the kind readiness of the two
young men, and the thrill of the whole scene. There we stood in the
beautiful Place Stanislas, that workmen from Versailles built for the
father-in-law of Louis Quinze. A flickering moonlight touched the
gilding of the famous _grilles_ that shut in the square; and the only
light in the wide space seemed to come from this one hotel taken by
the American authorities for the use of their officers and Red Cross
workers passing to and from the Rhine. When that square was built,
George Washington was a youth of twenty, and after one hundred and
seventy years it stood within the war-zone of an American Army, which
had crossed the Atlantic to fight in Europe!

Next day we spent entirely in the American sector, between Nancy and
Toul, where American road directions and sign-boards, and fine,
newly-built camps and depots for the American forces met us in all
directions. A military policeman from a coloured regiment put us into
the right road for St. Mihiel after leaving Toul--a strongly-built,
bronzed fellow, dealing with the stream of military and civil traffic
at a cross roads in Eastern France with perfect ease and _sang-froid_.
The astonishment and interest of this American occupation of a country
so intensely and ultimately national, so little concerned in ordinary
times with any other life than its own as France, provincial France
above all, never ceased to hold me as we drove on and on through the
American sector; especially when darkness and moonlight returned, and
again and again as we passed through wrecked villages where a few
chinks of light here and there showed a scattered billet or two, the
American military policeman on duty would emerge from the shadows,
tall, courteous, self-possessed, to answer a question, or show the
way, and we left him behind, apparently the only human being under the
French night, in sole possession of the ruins round him.

But before darkness fell, during the central part of