ldiers filed by. Interspersed with the soldiers were
civilians, the women and children, for none of the villages are
evacuated. Not even the occasional boom of a gun far off could give to
this thing the character of real war. It recalled the days of my
soldiering in the militia camp at Framingham in Massachusetts. It was
simply impossible to believe that it was real. Even the faces of the
soldiers were smiling. There was no such sense of terribleness, of
strain and weariness as I later found about Verdun. The Lorraine front
is now inactive, tranquil; it has been quiet so long that men have
forgotten all the carnage and horror of the earlier time.

We turned out of the valley and climbed abruptly up the hillside. In a
moment we came into the centre of a tiny village and looked into a row
of houses, whose roofs had been swept off by shell fire. Here and
there a whole house was gone; next door the house was undisturbed and
the women and children looked out of the doors. The village was St.
Genevieve, and we were at the extreme front of the French in August,
and against this hill burst the flood of German invasion. Leaving the
car we walked out of the village, and at the end of the street a sign
warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, for which we were bound:
"War--do not trespass." This was the burden of the warning.

Once beyond this sign we came out suddenly upon an open plateau, upon
trenches. Northward the slope descended to a valley at our feet. It
was cut and seamed by trenches, and beyond the trenches stood the
posts that carried the barbed-wire entanglements. Here and there,
amidst the trenches, there were graves. I went down to the barbed-wire
entanglements and examined them curiously. They at least were real.
Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of
a mile below; they had come on in that famous massed attack, they
had come on in the face of machine gun and "seventy-fives." They had
just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below,
the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had been
buried.

[Illustration: GERMAN LORRAINE (map)]

Looking out from the trenches the whole country unfolded. Northward
the little village of Atton slept under the steep slope of
Cote-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned with an ancient chateau.
From the hill the German artillery had swept the ground where I stood.
Below the hill to the west was Pont-a-Mousson, t