ver. The color of these villages in Lorraine is
rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local
buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes
well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A
glorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight and
islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no
combatants in it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drove
the wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the
animals. There were pictures of soldier grooms leading horses down a
narrow, slimy street between brown, mud-spattered walls to a
drinking-trough; of horses lined up along a house wall being briskly
curry-combed by big, thick-set fellows in blousy white overalls and blue
fatigue caps; and of doors of stables opening on the road showing a
bedding of brown straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench,
too, the smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was
able to classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that
clings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and
cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of
horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guarded
exit of the village to the shell zone was a little military cemetery in
which rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in a
paper.

Two kilometres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell zone. A
cottage had been struck the day before, and the shell, arriving by the
roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street. In the
facade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on its
hinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-car
through, rose from the ground and came to a point just below the
overhang of the roof. The edges of the broken stone were clean and new
in contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling.

A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of the
orifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles.

"They killed two there yesterday," said the lieutenant, pointing out the
debris.

The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a great
foundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full of
soldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing in
doorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere. And
looking at