oung woman wearing a little black cape
over her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of a
confectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popular
patriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" shell tied
round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white
apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head;
and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in
a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I
was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that
night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.

"Please give me all your military papers," said my officer. I handed
over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and he
examined them closely.

"Allons, let us go," he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearing
the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.

"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?"

"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilometres distant."

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to notice
anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy,
built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the
industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the iron
mines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly huddle we
passed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the
gutters,--nothing to remind one of the war.

"Halt!"

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small,
gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of a
neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny yellow
hair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out to look at us.

"Your papers, please," said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant wearing a
brown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on enormous fat legs, had
followed the sentry out into the street. The lieutenant produced the
military permit to travel in the army zone--the ordre de mouvement, a
printed form on a blue sheet about the size of a leaf of typewriter
paper.

"Pass," said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his post
on the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued to
stare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like uniforms
had attracted her attention; the French are very curious about les
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