tmartre, found a Luxembourger lying
within a yard of him whom he had known as a messenger in a big hotel in
Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. "It is
stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were happy when we were good
friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each
other?" He died with his arms around the neck of the soldier who told me
the story, unashamed of his own tears.

I could tell a score of tales like this, told to me by men whose eyes
were still haunted by the sight of these things; and perhaps one day
they will be worth telling, so that people of little imagination may
realize the meaning of this war and put away false heroics from their
lips. It is dirty business, with no romance in it for any of those fine
young Frenchmen I have learned to love, who still stay in the trenches
on the frontier lines or march a little way into Lorraine and back
again.

Some of those trenches on either side are still filled with men leaning
forward with their rifles pointing to the enemy--quite dead, in spite of
their lifelike posture.

*Along the German Lines Near Metz*

[Correspondence of The Associated Press.]

WITH THE GERMAN ARMY BEFORE METZ, Sept. 30, (by Courier to Holland and
Mail to New York.)--A five-day trip to the front has taken the
correspondent of The Associated Press through the German fortresses of
Mainz, Saarbruecken, and Metz, through the frontier regions between Metz
and the French fortress line from Verdun to Toul, into the actual
battery positions from which German and Austrian heavy artillery were
pounding their eight and twelve-inch shells into the French barrier
forts and into the ranks of the French field army which has replaced the
crumbling fortifications of steel and cement with ramparts of flesh and
blood.

Impressions at the end are those of some great industrial undertaking
with powerful machinery in full operation and endless supply trains
bringing up the raw materials for manufacture rather than of war as
pictured.

From a point of observation on a hillside above St. Mihiel the great
battlefield on which a German army endeavoring to break through the line
of barrier forts between Verdun and Toul and the opposing French forces
could be surveyed in its entirety. In the foreground lay the level
valley of the Meuse, with the towns of St. Mihiel and Banoncour nestling
upon the green landscape. Beyond and behind the valley rose a tier of
hill