hospital during the
first battle of the Somme in 1915, and as it could only accommodate a
limited number she had hospital tents erected in the park. Seven
hundred were cared for there. Lucheux is now a hospital for officers.

She herself is an infirmiere major and not only goes back and forth
constantly to the hospitals in which she is interested, particularly
Lucheux, but sometimes nurses day and night.

I was very anxious to see Lucheux, as well as Arras, which is not far
from Amiens, and, a vast ruin, is said to be by moonlight the most
beautiful sight on earth. We both besieged the War Office. But in
vain. The great Battle of the Somme had just begun. They are so polite
at the Ministere de la Guerre! If I had only thought of it a month
earlier. Or if I could remain in France a month or two longer? But
helas! They could not take the responsibility of letting an American
woman go so close to the big guns. And so forth. It was sad enough
that the duchess risked her life, took it in her hand, in fact, every
time she visited the chateau, but as a Frenchwoman, whose work was of
such value to France, it was their duty to assist her in the
fulfillment of her own duty to her country. Naturally her suggestion
to take me on her passport as an infirmiere was received with a smile.
So I must see Arras with a million other tourists after the war.

The duchess prefers for reasons of her own to work, not with the
noblesse division of the Red Cross, but with the Union des Femmes de
France. As she is extremely independent, impatient, and enterprising,
with a haughty disdain of red tape, the reasons for this uncommon
secession may be left to the reader.

And if she is to-day one of the most valued of the Ministere de la
Guerre's cooeperators, she has on the other hand reason to be grateful
for the incessant demands upon her mind, for her anxieties have been
great--no doubt are still. Not only is the duc at the front, but one
of two young nephews who lived with her was killed last summer, and
the other, a young aviator, who was just recovering from typhoid when
I was there, was ill-concealing his impatience to return to the Front.
Her son, a boy of seventeen--a volunteer of course--in the sudden and
secret transfers the army authorities are always making, sometimes
could not communicate with her for a fortnight at a time, and
meanwhile she did not know whether he was alive or "missing." Since
then he has suffered one of those crue