Classic Audiobook Collection - Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort by Edith Wharton ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort by Edith Wharton audiobook. Genre: history In Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, acclaimed American novelist Edith Wharton turns eyewitness and correspondent, traveling through a nation at war to record what she sees and hears in the early years of World War I. Moving from the battered ports and trenches near Dunkerque to the contested eastern frontier around Belfort, Wharton enters hospitals, relief stations, military zones, and resilient towns that live under the constant pressure of modern warfare. With a sharp eye for detail and a deep sympathy for civilians and soldiers alike, she captures the texture of daily life: the improvisations of aid workers, the discipline of the army, the strain on families, and the fierce pride that holds communities together. The book is both a journey through devastated landscapes and a portrait of French endurance, blending vivid scene-setting with reflective commentary on duty, sacrifice, and national identity. Part travel narrative, part wartime reportage, Fighting France offers a memorable, intimate view of a historical turning point as experienced on the ground by one of the era's most perceptive observers. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:34:57) Chapter 2 (01:15:11) Chapter 3 (01:54:20) Chapter 4 (02:31:01) Chapter 5 (03:01:46) Chapter 6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fighting France, from Dunkirk to Belfour. By Edith Wharton Chapter 1 The Look of Paris August 1914 to February 1915 1 August On the 30th of July 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a field.

Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border of a woodland, and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and the sober, disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact gray villages seem merely flat and tame. At other moments, the sensitive imagination sees in every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless, vigilant attachment of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war-rumors which had hung on us

since morning. All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time we reached Chart, towards four o'clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible. We were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of color. Framed by such depths of darkness, and steeped in a blaze of midsummer sun, the familiar windows seemed singularly remote, and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now they widened into dark-shored pools, splashed with sunset, now glittered and menaced

like the shields of fighting angels. Some were cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others the sails of galleons bound for the purple islands, and in the western wall the scattered fires of the rose window hung like a constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes from these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar-lights, seemed to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances, and its little islands of illusion. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquilizing

power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of Schacht gave us in that perfect hour. It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights of St. Cloud and Serene, the reaches of the Sen trembled with the blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Chonsalise sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk, and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the

radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and art and and all humanist graces, seemed to lie by her riverside like a princess, guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower. The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed them. Everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war.

The cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet over the edge, but the whole incalculable weight of things as they were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Paris went on steadily about her midsummer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists, who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century. All the while everyone knew that other work was going on also. The whole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless, invisible currents of preparation. The sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balmyness of a

perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till the evening papers came. They said little or nothing except what everyone was already declaring all over the country. We don't want war. May y'all la finis. This kind of thing has got to stop. That was the only phrase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war, so much the better. No one in France wanted it. All who spent the first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of feeling on that point. But But if war had to come, the country and every heart in it, was ready. At the dressmakers the next morning the tired fitters were preparing to leave for their usual holiday.

They looked pale and anxious. Decidedly there was a new weight of apprehension in the air. And in the Rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of white paper against the wall of the Minister de la Marine. General mobilization, they read, and an armed nation knows what that means. But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers-by read the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations.

The dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatized. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen across the path of an orderly, laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilization. That evening in a restaurant of the Rue Royale, we sat at a table in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what mobilization was, a huge break in the normal flow of traffic,

like the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were on foot and carrying their luggage, for since dawn every cab and taxi and motor omnibus had disappeared. The war office had thrown out its dragnet and caught them all in. The crowd that passed our window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the mobilisable of the first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their families and friends. But among them were little clusters of bewildered tourists, laboring along with bags and bundles, and watching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts, puzzled inarticulate waifs caught

in the cross-trides racing to a maelstrom. In the restaurant the befrogged and red-coated band poured out patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring obligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for God Save the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to stand up again for the Marseillaise. And say that's some des anguas who juet to this, a humorist remarked from the pavement. As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the loiterers outside began to join in the war song.

And the loyal round begins again. La Chanson du Despar is a frequent demand, and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A sort of quiet humor was the note of the street. Down the Rue Royale, toward the Madeline, the bands of other restaurants were attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the boulevard like its garland of arc lights. It was a night of singing in acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It was Paris Baudaudou-dry at its best.

Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers, the steady stream of conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside them, carrying all kinds of odd, improvised bags and bundles. The impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion was that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselessly streaming by were serious, but not sad, nor was there any air of bewilderment, the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible. They understood their stake in the job, and accepted it. The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let the other army move. No more wild rushes to the station,

no more bribing of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of waiting in the queue at Cooks. No train stirred except to carry soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night, could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and wait. Back they went, disappointed, yet half-relieved, to the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts, to the queer, disjointed life of fashionable hotels, suddenly reduced to the intimacies and makeshift of a Latin quarter-pensian.

Meanwhile, it was strange to watch the gradual paralysis of the city, As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left the sun. The canal boats too were gone, or lay motionless. Loading and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed in emptiness. All the endless avenues stretched away to desert distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs.

shaken out of their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes. Paris, so intensely conscious, yet so strangely entranced, seemed to have had Courard injected into all her veins. The next day, the second of August, from the terrace of the Hotel de Criand, one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life. Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in detachmentesements, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. One detachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg and laid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstration would at once have attracted a crowd, but at the very moment when it might have been expected

to provoke a patriotic outburst, it excited no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to give a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did not even stop to look. The meaning of the separat indifference was obvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that mobilize. Those who stay behind must do the same. For each French household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a complete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts, unnoticed, paid their tribute to the cause, and passed on. Looked back on from these sterner months, those early days in Paris, in their setting of grave architecture

and summer skies, where the light of the ideal and the abstract. The sudden flaming up of national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation, cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on war rather than facing its realities. Something of this sense of exaltation seemed to penetrate the throngs who streamed up and down the boulevards till late into the night. All wheeled traffic had ceased, except that of the rare taxi-cabs impressed to carry conscripts to the stations, and the middle of the boulevard was as thronged with foot-passengers as an Italian marketplace on a Sunday morning. The vast tide swayed up and down at a slow pace, breaking now and then

to make room for one of the volunteer legions which were forming at every corner—Italian, Romanian, South American, North American, each headed by its national flag and hailed with cheering as it passed. But even the cheers were sober. was not to be shaken out of herself-imposed serenity. One felt something nobly conscious and voluntary in the mood of this quiet multitude. Yet it was a mixed throng, made up of every class, from the scum of the exterior boulevards to the cream of the fashionable restaurants. These people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across the frontier. Now, workers and idlers,

Thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion. The people, luckily, predominated. The faces of workers looked best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them, each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium flash of passion. I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women, and also the small but significant fact that every one of them had remembered to bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had to take their chance of seeing what they could

through the forest of human legs. But every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch, scores and scores of small, serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the quiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign that they had not been forgotten that night. 2. We had been shown, impressively, what it was to live through a mobilization. Now we were to learn that mobilization is only one of the concomitants of martial law, and that martial law is not comfortable to live

under, at least till one gets used to it. At first its main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainly to be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life, and in that line it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructions began to shower on us after the law-lawful. of the first days, instructions as to what to do and what not to do, in order to make our presence tolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreigners could not remain in France without satisfying the authorities as to their nationality and antecedents. And to do this, necessitated repeated ineffective visits to Chancery, consulates, and police

station, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants to permit the entrance of one more. Between these vain pilgrimages the traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to dismal distant railway stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must also be viz by the police. There was a moment when it seemed that one's inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable visa. To obtain which, more fruitless hours, must be lived on grimy stairways between perspiring layers of fellow aliens. Meanwhile, one's money was probably running short, and one must cable or

telegraph for more. Ah, but cables and telegrams must be used. Viz, too, and even when they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent. Then one could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of words contained in a New York address, seemed to multiply as the Franks in one's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatched, it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response, impossible at present, making every effort. It is fair to add that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good nature of the French functionary, who, for the

first time, probably, in the long tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule and was kind. Luckily, too, these incessant comings and goings involved much walking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler and more beautiful each day. had such blue-gray softness of afternoon brooded over Paris, such sunsets turned the heights of the trocadero into Didos Carthage, never above all so rich a moon ripened through such perfect evenings. The Sen itself had no small share in this mysterious increase of the city's beauty. Released from all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into long silken

reaches in which keys and monuments at last saw their unbroken images. At night the firefly lights of the boats had vanished, and the reflections of the street-lamps were lengthened into streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calm current like fluted water-weeds. Then the moon rose and took possession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming and enlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength and repose. There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of the August evenings, so exposed, yet so serene, as though her very beauty shielded her. So gradually we fell into the habit of living under martial law.

After the first days of flustered adjustment, the personal inconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of their not being more, of not being called on to contribute some greater sacrifice of comfort to the cause. Within the first week over two-thirds of the shops had closed, the greater number bearing on their shuttered windows the notice, for cause de mobilization, which showed that the patron and staff were at the front. But enough remained open to satisfy it. every ordinary want, and the closing of the others served to prove how much one could do without.

Provisions were as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it was easier to buy food than to have it cooked. The restaurants were closing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal, and wait a longer time to get it. A few hotels still carried on a halting life, galvanized by an occasional in-rush of travel from Belgium and Germany, but most of them had closed or were being hastily transformed into hospitals. The signs over these hotel-door first disturbed the dreaming harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with red crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with Uvoire, or Opital, beneath. There was something sinister in these preparations for horrors

in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, the mood of early August, the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood.

War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert hush more complete. The silence of a street is always so much deeper than the silence of wood or field. The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression of suspended life. The days were dumb enough, but at night the hush became acute. In the quarter-iron habit, always deserted in summer, the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintest pin-prick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence. I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and the tread

of the policeman guarding the embassy across the street beat against the pavement like a series of detonations. Even the variegated noises of the cities waking up had ceased. If any sweepers, scavengers, or rag-pickers still plied their trades, they did it as secretly as ghosts. I remember one morning being roused out of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room. I sat up with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchange of bonjour in the street. Another fact that kept the reality of war from Paris was the curious absence of troops in the streets. After the first rush of conscripts hurrying to their military bases, it might have been imagined that the reign of peace had set in. While smaller cities were swarming with soldiers, no glitter of arms was reflected in the empty avenues of the capital.

capital, no military music sounded through them. Paris scorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children on the mere sight of her beauty. It was enough." Even when the news of the first ephemeral successes in Alsace began to come in, the Parisians did not swerve from their even gait. The newsboys did all the shouting, and even theirs was presently silenced by decree. It seemed as though it had been unanimously instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect resemble the Paris of the Paris of of 1870, and as though this resolution had passed at birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date, and ignorant of its bitter lesson.

The unanimity of self-restraint was the notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into an unsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spirit might have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bred in peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it is precisely on such a mood that easy triumphs might have been supposed to have the most disturbing effect. It was the crowd in the street that shouted, "'A Berlin!' in 1870. Now the crowd in the street continued to mind its own business, in spite of showers of extras and two sanguine bulletins. I remember the morning when our

butcher's boy brought the news that the first German flag had been hung out on the balcony of the Ministry of War. Now, I thought, the Latin will boil over, and I wanted to be there to see it. I hurried down the quiet rue de Martineauque, turned the corner of the Place Saint-Courte-Eld, and came on an orderly crowd filling the street before the Ministry of War. The crowd was so orderly that the few pacific gestures of the police easily cleared away for passing cabs, and for the military motors perpetually dashing up. It was composed of all classes, and there were many family groups, with little boys straddling their mother's shoulders, or lifted up by the policemen when they were too

heavy for their mothers. It is safe to say that there was hardly a man or woman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front, and there before them hung the enemy's first flag. A splendid silk flag, white and black and crimson, and embroidered with gold. It was the flag of an Alsatian regiment, a regiment of Prussianized Alsace. It symbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job that lay ahead of them. It symbolized also their finest ardor and their noblest hate. And the reason why, if every other reason failed, France could never lay down arms till

the last of such flags was low. And there they stood and looked at it, not dully or unconcern. comprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence, as if already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it others like it, foreseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed to be men's hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the mothers whose weak arms held them up. So they gazed and went on, and made way for others like them, who gazed in their turn, and

went on too. All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the same crowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily at the flag, and knew what its being there meant. That in August was the look of Paris. Three. February. February dusk on the Sen. The boats are plying again, but they stop at nightfall, and the river is inky smooth, with the same long, weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer and paler. Bright lights are muffled everywhere. The The line of the keys is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the trocadero are lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm tower-tops of Notre Dame.

Down the damp pavements only a few street lamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and the windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are all blind. In the narrow streets of the Rive-Goshe, the darkness is even deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or Sitae create effects of Pernese-like mystery. The gleam of the chestnut roaster's brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurous Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies. I turn on my way home, into an empty street between high garden walls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end. Not a soul is in sight between me and that light. My steps echo endlessly in the silence. Presently a dim figure comes around the corner ahead of me. Man or woman. Impossil. to tell till I overtake it. The February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are indistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them.

If you know the quarter you count doors from the corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment. If you are in a strange street, you must ask at the nearest tobacconists—for as for finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn't tell him from your grandmother. Such, after six months of war, are the knights of Paris. The days are less remarkable, and less romantic. Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone. Or so at least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of life.

It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries, even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her theatres open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired, Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to those who lived through that first sunlit silent month, the streets today show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the motorbuses and of the huge lumbering commercial vans leaves many a forgotten perspective open, and reveals many a lost grace of architecture. But the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as abundant as in peacetime,

and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and war office motors. Many shops have reopened. A few theaters are tentatively producing patriotic drama or mixed programs seasonal with sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful kilometers. For a while in September and October the streets were made picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery and the aggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh faces and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to militarism which Paris offers to the casual sightseer is the occasional drilling of a handful

of pew-pieu on the muddy reaches of the Place de Sambalide. But there is another army in Paris. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September days, lamentable rear-guard of the Allies retreat on Paris. Since then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have percolated through all currents of Paris life, so that wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy, confident, strongly stepping Parisians,

one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving, men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired out babies pressed against their shoulders, the great army of the refugees. Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment, or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins, can shake off the obsession of the refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face she turns to the enemy.

These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avizano. They were ploughing and sewing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood. came down on them. And now, here they are, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old

men trampled by drunken heels, and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet or intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal ticket, and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes. What are the Parisians doing, meanwhile? For one thing, and the sign is a good one, they are refilling the shops, and especially, of course, the great department stores.

In the early war days there was no stranger's sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed between miles of unpurchased wares and quest of vanished salesmen. A few clerks, of course, were left. Enough one would have thought for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few there were did not care to be disturbed. They lurked behind their walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to be discovered. And when one had coaxed them out, they went through the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering that anyone should care to buy. I remember once at the Louvre seeing the whole force of a departing including the salesman I was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze,

desert their posts simultaneously to gather about a motorcyclist in a muddy uniform, who had dropped in to see his pals with tails from the front. But after six months, the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself, and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman. I say shop, instead of buy, to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without. It is evident that, you that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the department store? Even allowing for the immense the perpetual

buying of supplies for hospitals and workrooms, the incessant stoking up of the innumerable centres of charitable production, there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments, the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the tea-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively, and economically, to concerts, but the swinging doors of the department stores suck her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.

No one in this respect would wish the look of Paris to be changed. It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again, even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other crowds streaming daily, and on Sunday in immensely augmented numbers, across the Pont-Alexandre Trois to the Great Court of the Invalide, where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs, face to face with the long triple row of German guns.

There are few in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a blow. There are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired a new character. The change seems to have effected the very stuff it is molded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human clay into some dense commemorative subject.

substance. I often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals, idealized images of what they were in the flesh, and the masks of some of the men, those queer, tormented, gallic masks, crushed in and squat and a little satyr-like, look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation. They are looking, one and all, at France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing different widths of Valenciennes at the lace counter all have something of that vision in their eyes, or else one does not see the ones who haven't. It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in arms. There are as few

troops to be seen as ever, and but for the coming and going of the orderlies attached to the war office and the military government and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets. No sign, that is, except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately that they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of the capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country, were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded have been much speculated upon and variously explained. One of its results may have been the maintaining in Paris, of the extraordinary moral health which has given

its tone to the whole country, and which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any misery. And misery's enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms, and their wearers usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces. One hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however.

They are calm, meditative, strangely purified, and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness, and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finally tempered, that for a long time to come, Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of Fighting France. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Recording by Elizabeth Clet. Fighting France, from Dunkirk to Belfour. By Edith Wharton. Chapter 2. In Argonne 1. The permission to visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitals behind the lines gave me, at the end of February, my first sight of war. Paris is no longer included in the military zone, either in fact or in appearance.

Though it is still manifestly under the war-cloud, its air of reviving activity produces the illusion that the menace which casts the cloud is far off, not only in distance, but in time. Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness, and it is startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from such an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent sense of war. Going eastward one begins to feel the change just beyond Moe. Between that quiet Episcopal city and the hill-town of Montmirai, some forty miles farther east, there are no sensational evidences of the great conflict of September. Only here and there in an unplowed field, or among the fresh-brown furrows, a little mound with a wooden

cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins to perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Moe and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a child and an old woman looked from a doorway. But many of the fields were fallow, and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts driven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter and a copse, a road-mender hammering at his stones, but already the civilian motor had disappeared, and all the dust-coloured cars dashing past us were marked with the Red Cross,

or the number of an army division. At every bridge and railway crossing, a sentinel, standing in the middle of the road with a lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined our papers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangible proof of military rule. But with the descent of the first hill beyond Montmirai, there came the positive feeling, This is war. Along the white road rippling away eastward over the dimpled country, the army motors were pouring by and endless lines, broken now and then by the dark mass of a tramping regiment or

the clatter of a train of artillery. In the intervals between these waves of military traffic, we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing past of dispatch bears on motorcycles, and of hideously hooting little motors, carrying goggled officers and goat-skins and woolen helmets. The villages along the road all seemed empty, not figuratively, but literally empty. None of them has suffered from the German invasion, save by the destruction here and there, of a single house on which some random malice has wrecked itself. But since the general flight in September, all have remained abandoned, or are provisionally occupied by troops, and the rich country between Montmirai and Chalon is a desert. The first sight of Chame is extraordinarily

exhilarating. The old town lying so pleasantly between canal and river is the headquarters of an army, not of a corps or of a division, but of a whole army. And the network of gray provincial streets about the Romanesque towers of Notre Dame rustles with the movement of war. The square before the principal hotel, the incomparably named Ote Mardieu, is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern war can be. Rows of gray motor-lories and omnibuses do not lend themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and spitting and spurting motor-sight, and torpedo-racers are no substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvature of chargers. But once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and the neutral tints of the new warfare,

the scene in that crowded, clattering square becomes positively brilliant. It is a vision of one of the central functions of a great war, in all its concentrated energy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in. Yet even here such suggestions are never long out of sight, for one cannot pass through Chalon without meeting, on their way from the station, a long line of eclope, the unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-parallised wreckage of the awful struggle. These poor wretches, in their thousands, are daily shipped back from the front to rest and

be restored, and it is a grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of eyes that have seen what one dare not picture. If one could think away the eclop in the street and the wounded in their hospitals, Chalon would be an invigorating spectacle. When we drove up to the hotel, even the grey motors and the sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky. The continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding up of officers—for some still ride—the arrival of much decorated military personages and luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances

and the passing of detachments for the front. All these are sites that the Pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur-coats and haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the packed tables in the restaurant. It is not easy for civilians to get to Chalon, and almost every table is occupied by officers and soldiers. For once off duty there seems to be no rank distinction in this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he chooses to treat himself to the excellent fare of the Otmer-Dieu, has as good a right to it as his colonel. The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting. The mere attempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing. A week's experience

near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in the French army are alike either in color or in cut. Within the last two years the question of color has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue, and the range of their experiment is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of grayish robin's egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. The result attained is the conviction that no blue is really inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are no less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But to this scale of experimental blues, other colors must be added, the poppy red of the spahi's tunics, and various other less

familiar colors, gray and a certain greenish khaki, the use of which is due to the fact that the cloth supply has given out, and that all available materials are employed. As for the differences and cut, the uniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose-belted jacket copied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms and ranks embroidered on these diversified habits, add a new element of perplexity. The aviator's wings, the motorists' wheel, and many of the newer symbols are easily recognizable. But there are all the other arms, and the doctors and the stretcher-bears, the sappers and miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of this great host, which is really all the nation.

The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost as many types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good. One begins to understand, if one has failed to before, why the French say of themselves, La France is a nation guerier. War is the greatest of paradoxes, the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of qualities of soul,

which in every race can seemingly find no other means of renewal. Everything depends, therefore, on the category of impulses that war excites in a people. Looking at the faces at Chalon, one sees at once in which sense the French are Unacion Guerier. It is not too much to say that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful. all the faces about these crowded tables, young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average, have the same look of quiet authority. It is as though all nervosity, fussiness,

little personal oddities, meanness and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance. More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless or unimportant things till the first of last August, and now each one of them, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knows it, and has been made over by knowing it. Our road on leaving Chalon continue to run north-eastward toward the hills of the Argonne. We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging in the doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs, soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cooking over gypsy fires in the farm-yards.

In the patches of woodland along the road we came upon more soldiers, cutting down pine saplings, chopping them into even lengths and loading them on hand-carts, with the green boughs piled on top. We soon saw to what use they were put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box of mud and straw and plaited pine branches was plastered against a bank, or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of seventy-fives. Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants, and the stables of woven

pine boughs which stood nearby might have been the huge huts of their herdsmen. The country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which German fury spent itself most bestially during the abominable September days. Halfway between Chalon and Saint-Menehude, we came on the first evidence of the invasion, the lamentable ruins of the village of Ove. These pleasant villages of the N, with their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed granaries with the espaliate gable ends, are all much of one pattern, and one can easily picture what Ove must have been as it looked out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pairs of its garden to the crops in the valley, and the large landscape beyond.

Now it is a mere waste of rubble and cinders, not one threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined villages after Ove, but this was the first, and perhaps for what reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the separate terrors, anguishes, uprooting and rendings apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present.

Of all that accumulated warmth, nothing was left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes. As we ran on towards Saint-Menehoud, the names on our map showed us that, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles to the north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannon yet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the struggle was the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line of grey-coated figures tramping towards us between the bayonets of their captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh bag from the hills, of a fine, fighting age, and much less famished and war-torn than one could have wished. Their broad, blonde faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy. They seemed none too

sorry for their fate. Our pass from the General headquarters carried us to St. Menehoud on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the headquarters of the division for a farther extension. are lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and where sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted by theatrical posters, and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured counterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones, the rat-tat of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation, and the coming and going of hurried dispatch-bearers and orderlies. The extension to the permit was presently delivered with the courteous request that we should

push on to Verdun as fast as possible, as civilian motors were not wanted on the road that afternoon, and this request, coupled with the evident stir of activity at headquarters, gave us the impression that there must be a good deal happening beyond the low line of hills to the north. How much there was we were soon to know. We left Saint-Manud at about eleven, and before twelve o'clock we were nearing a large village on a ridge from which the land swept away to right and left in ample reaches. The first glimpse of the outlying houses, showed nothing unusual, but presently the main street turned and dipped downward, and below and beyond us lay a long stretch of ruins, the calcined remains of Clermont-on-Argon, destroyed

by the Germans on the 4th of September. The free and lofty situation of the little town, for it was really a good deal more than a village, makes its present state the more lamentable. One can see it from so far off, and through the torn traceries of its ruined church the eye travels over so lovely a stretch of country. No doubt its beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it. At the farther end of what was once the main street, another small knot of houses has survived. Chief among them is the hospice for old men, where Sister Gabriel Ronnais, where the authorities

of Clermont took to their hills, stayed behind to defend her charges, and where, ever since, she has nursed an undiminishing stream of wounded from the Eastern Front. We found Sir Ronnaie, with her sisters, preparing the midday meal of her patience in the little kitchen of the hospice, the kitchen which is also her dining-room and private office. She insisted on our finding time to share the fillet and fried potatoes that were just being taken off the stove, and while we lunched she told us the story of the invasion, of the hospice doors broken down, a coup de cross, and the grey officers bursting in with revolvers, and finding her there before them in the big vaulted vestibule, alone with my old men and my sisters.

Sir Gabriel Ronnais is a small, round, active woman, with a shrewd and ruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the dark background of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full of warmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her tale. She does not spare epithets in talking of— "'Cet stand Almond!' These sisters and nurses of the front have seen sights to dry up the last drop of sentimental pity. But through all the horror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing about

her, and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetual threat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitable absurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address the officer in command, because he was so tall that I couldn't see up to his shoulder-straps. "'Itilse'et te tu, come sa,' she added, a sort of reluctant admiration in her eyes. A subordinate good sister had just cleared the table and poured out our coffee, when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-fact tone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley. She added, calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus had just fallen a mile

or two off, and that if we liked we could see the fighting from a garden over the way. It did not take us long to reach that garden. Sir Gabriel showed the way, bouncing up the stairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we came out on a grassy terrace full of silver. soldiers. The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near that it was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillside that seemed like any other. But luckily somebody had a field-glass, and with its help a little corner of the Battle of Vokoi was suddenly brought close to us. The rush of French infantry up the slopes, the feathery drift of French

gun-smoke lower down, and high up on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white puffs of the German artillery. Rap, rap, rap, went the answering gun. guns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tongued wood, and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle. Though Sir Ronnais had seen too many such sights to be much moved, she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarely planted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passing it laughingly about among the soldiers.

But as we turned to go, she said, they've sent us word to be ready for another four hundred to-night, and the twinkle died out of her good eyes. Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed, for as we learned, a fortnight later from a three-column Comunique, the scene we had assisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assault on the high-perched village of Vokoi, a point of the first importance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to the north of Varen, and commanded the railway by which, since September, they have been revictualing and reinforcing their army in the Argonne. Vaux-Woi had been taken by them at the end of September, and thanks to its strong position

on a rocky spur, had been almost impregnably fortified. But the attack we looked on at from the Garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28th, carried the victorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made them masters of a part of the village. Driven from it again that night, they were to retake it after a five-day struggle of exceptional violence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely established there in a position to described as, a vital importance to the operations. But what it cost, Sir Gabriel said, when we saw her again a few days later.

2. The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away from Clermont, but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by the sight of the Red Cross over a village house. The house was little more than a hovel, the village, Blair Coor, it was called, a mere hamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables, a place. place so easily overlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there. An orderly went to find the Med Sinsche, and we waited after him through the mud to one after another of the cottages, in which, with admirable ingenuity, he had managed to create, out

of next to nothing, the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance, sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy, a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which Tisan were brewing over a cheerful fire. A detachment of cavalry was quartered in the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a great morass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in the doctor's wake, he told us of the expedients to which he had been put to secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded. It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line of the front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into villages meant to house four or fire.

And we admired the skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and managed to lodge his patience decently. We came back to the High Road, and he asked us if we should like to see the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch the Curay was ringing the bell for Vespers. We pushed open the inner doors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the nave stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every one lay a soldier.

the doctor's worst cases. Few of them wounded, the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frostbite, pleurisy, or some other form of trench sickness too severe to permit of their being carried further from the front. One or two heads turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men did not move. The Curate, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come out before the altar and his vestments, followed by a little white acolyte. A handful of women, probably the only civil inhabitants left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots, and the service began.

It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was all in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey, the sick under their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against the pillows, the black dresses of the women, they seemed all to be in mourning, and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte's censer. The only light in the scene, the candle gleams on the altar, and their reflection in the embroideries of the Curais Chauzeable, were like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk. For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church, but presently the Curé took up in French the canticle of the Sacred Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little

congregation joined their trembling voices in the refrain, Sové Sauve la France, "'ne l' l'le appell'erated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the nave. "'Sauvet! Sauve la France!' the women wailed it near the altar. The soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones, but the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more as the day faded. The church looked like a quiet graveyard in a battlefield. After we had left Saint-Manud, the sense of the nearness and all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road, branching away to our left, was a finger touching a red wound. Varenne, Le Fours de Paris, Le Bois de la Gruey, were not more than eight or ten miles to the

north. Along our own road, the stream of motor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer, and more frequent. Once we passed a long line of seventy-five's going single-file at a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of artillery galloping across a stretch of open country. The movement of supplies was continuous, and every village through which we passed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans, were clustered about the commissariat motors, while hams and quarters of beef were handed out. As we approached Verdun, the cannonade had grown louder again, and when we reached the walls of the town and passed under the iron teeth of the Port-Cullis, we felt ourselves in one of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense.

The desolation of Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of Chalon. The civil population was evacuated in September, and only a small percentage have returned. Nine-tenths of the shops are closed, and as the troops are nearly all in the trenches, there is hardly any movement in the streets. The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed the challenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill to the citadel at the top of the town. Here the military authorities inspect one's papers, and deliver a Permit de Sejour, which must be verified by the police before lodgings can be obtained.

We found the principal hotel much less crowded than the Otmerdeu at Chalon, though many of the officers of the garrison mess there. The whole atmosphere of the place was different—silent, concentrated, passive. To the chance observer, Verdin appears to live only in its hospitals, and of these there are fourteen within the walls alone. As darkness fell, the streets became completely deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more incessant. That first night the hush was so intense that every reverberation from the dark hills beyond

the walls brought out in the mind its separate vision of destruction, and then, just as the strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo, and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated. On entering the gates the first sight to attract us had been a colony of roughly built bungalows, scattered over the miry slopes of a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the sign, evacuation hospital number six. The next morning we went to visit it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the

surgeon in charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots, scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor, and the immense ward is warmed by a row of stove. down the central passage. In the bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the town. In one bungalow an operating room has been installed, in another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon in charge, and the infirmier

Major, who indefatigably seconds him. Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour almost on the dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers between the railway station and the gate of the little park across the way and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a hospital may become in skillful and devoted hands verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front among them st nicola in a big airy building on the meuse is an example of a great french military hospital at its best but i visited few others for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the second-lined ambulances beyond the town the first we went to was in a small village to the north of verdun not far from the enemy's lines at cosenvoy and was fairly representative of all the others the dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive, but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses, or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere,

was for blankets and clean underclothing, for the wounded are brought in from the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without having washed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in these second-lined ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed intelligent and anxious to do the best they could for their men in conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way is the overcrowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers are camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad enough for men in health, and there is also a great need for light diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed on

meat and vegetables. In the afternoon we started out again in a snowstorm, over a desolate, rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blew fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional cavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed the mournfulness of this depopulated land. We might have been wandering over the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down the steel-gray Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Epeze,

the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going on. There must have been a lull on the fighting that day, for the cannon had ceased. But the scene at the point where we left the motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict. The long, straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of cavalry and the hauling of guns, had turned the land about it into a mud-flat. Before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office had been installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medical inspector who had accompanied us. Nearby stood the usual flock of gray motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going

of cavalry remounts and riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men. The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had been partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the men lay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and warm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness to a canal-boat, which had been fitted up with hot douche. The boat was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shot off by a gay curtain of red-flower chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as the hot water to make over the morale of the men. They were the most comforting sight of the day. Farther north and on the other bank of the Meuse lies another large

village which has been turned into a colony of Eklop. Fifteen hundred sick or exhausted men are housed there, and there are no hot douche or chintz curtains to cheer them. We were taken first to the church, a large, featureless building at the head of the street. In the doorway our passage was obstructed by a mountain of damp straw, which a gang of hostler soldiers were pitchforking out of the aisles. The interior of the church was dim. and suffocating. Between the pillars hung screens of plaited straw, forming little enclosures in each of which about a dozen sick men lay on more straw, without mattresses or blankets. No beds, no tables, no chairs, no washing appliances. In their muddy clothes, as they come from the

front, they are bedded down on the stone floor like cattle, till they are well enough to go back to their job. It was a pitiful contrast to the little church at Blaircour, with the altar-lights twinkling above the clean beds, and one wondered if even so near the front it had to be. The African village, we call it, one of our companions said with a laugh, but the African village has blue sky over it, and a clear stream runs between its mud huts. We had been told at Saint-Mernoud that for military reasons we must follow a more southerly direction on our return to Chalon, and when we left Verdun we took the road to Bar-le-Duc. It runs southwest over a beautiful broken country, untouched by war except to

for the fact that its villages, like all the others in this region, are either deserted or occupied by troops. As we left Verdun behind us, the sound of the cannon grew fainter and died out, and we had the feeling that we were gradually passing beyond the flaming boundaries into a more normal world. But suddenly, at a cross-road, a sign-post snatched us back to war. Sain-Mill 18 kilometers. Sain Miel, the danger-spot of the region, the weak joint in the armor. There it lay, up that harmless-looking by-road, not much more than ten miles away, a ten-minute's dash would have brought us into the thick of the gray coats and spiked helmets.

The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles, darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud. Bar-le-Duc seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was in its normal state of provincial apathy. Few soldiers were about, and here at last civilian life again predominated. a few days on the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the first sight of a busy, unconscious community. One looks instinctively in the eyes of the passers-by, for a reflection of that other vision,

and feels diminished by contact with people going so indifferently about their business. A little way beyond Bar-Laduke we came on another phase of the war vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August invasion, and between Bar-Lad duke and Vitri Le François, the high road is lined with ruined towers. The first we came to was Le Mans, a large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it. Then comes Réveni, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely leveled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of

shop-fronts, handsome doorways, the colonnated street of a public building. A few miles farther lies the most piteous of the group, the village of Altslemarupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped and wounded and dishonored that it lies there by the roadside like a human victim. In this part of the country, which is one of many crossroads, we began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the sign-posts thrown down, and the enameled plaque on the houses at the entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that this precaution was taken by the inhabitants, at the approach of the invading

army, another that the Germans themselves demolished the sign-posts and plastered over the milestones in order to paint on them misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremely bewildering, for all the villages being either in ruins or uninhabited, There is no one to question but the soldiers one meets, and their answer is almost invariably, We don't know. We don't belong here. One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel who knows the name of the village he is guarding. It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris,

and to wander, as we did, for hours across a high heathery waist, with wide blue distances to north and south, and in all the scene not a landmark by means of which we could make a guess at our whereabouts. One of our haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy by-road, with the long lines of seventy-fives ranged along its banks like gray ant-eaters in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on became to a bemired village, swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move. It seems improbable that we were meant to be there, for our arrival caused such surprise that no sentry remembered to challenge us, and obsequiously saluting suiting soon.

fieux officier instantly cleared away for the motor. So, by a happy accident, we caught one more war picture, all of vehement movement, as we passed out of the zone of war. We were still very distinctly in it on returning to Chalon, which, if it had seemed packed on our previous visit, was now quivering and cracking with fresh crowds. The stir about the fountain in the square before the Ote Mardieu was more melodramatic than ever. Everyone was in a hurry. Everyone booted and mud-splashed. and spurred or sordid or dispatch-bagged, and somehow labeled as a member of the huge military beehive. The privilege of telephoning and telegraphing being denied to civilians in the war-zone,

it was ominous to arrive at nightfall on such a crowded scene, and we were not surprised to be told that there was not a room left at the Ote-Merdieu, and that even the sofas in the reading-room had been let for the night. At every other inn in the town we met with the same answer, and finally we decided to ask permission to go on as far as Eperne, about twelve miles off. At headquarters we were told that our request could not be granted. No motors are allowed to circulate after nightfall in the zone of war, and the officer charged with the distribution of motor permits pointed out that, even if an exception were made in our favor, we should probably be turned back by the first sentinel we met, only to find

ourselves unable to re-enter Chalon without another permit. This alternative was so alarming that we began to think ourselves relatively lucky to be on the right side of the gates, and we went back to the Oates Mertieu to squeeze into a a crowded corner of the restaurant for dinner. The hope that someone might have suddenly left the hotel in the interval was not realized, but after dinner we learned from the landlady that she had certain rooms permanently reserved for the use of the staff, and that, as these rooms had not yet been called for that evening, we might possibly be allowed to occupy them for the night. At Chalon the headquarters are in the prefecture, a coldly handsome building

of the 18th century, and there, in a majestic stone vestibule, beneath the gilded ramp of a great festal staircase, we waited in anxious suspense, among the orderlies in Estefet, while our unusual request was considered. The result of the deliberation was an expression of regret. Nothing could be done for us, as officers might at any moment arrive from the general headquarters and require the rooms. It was then past nine o'clock, and bitterly cold, and we began to wonder. Finally the polite officer who had been charged to dismiss us, moved to compassion at our

plight, offered to give us a laissez-pacé back to Paris. but paris was about a hundred and twenty-five miles off the night was dark the cold was piercing and at every cross-road and railway crossing a sentinel would have to be convinced of our right to go further we remembered the warning given us earlier in the evening and declining the offer went out again into the cold and just then chance took pity on us in the restaurant we had run across a friend attached to the staff and now meeting him again in the depth of our difficulty we were told of lodgings to be found near by he could not take us there for it was past the hour when he had a right to be out or we either for that matter since curfew sounds at nine in chalon but he told us how to find our way through the maze of little unlit streets about the cathedral standing there beside the motor in the icy darkness of the deserted square and whispering hastily as he turned to leave us You ought not to be out so late, but the word to-night is Gina. When you give it to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you. With that he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe that I was I, or Chalon Chalon, or that a young man who in Paris drops in to dine with me,

and talk over new books and plays, had been whispering a password in my ear to carry me unchallenged to a house a few streets away. reality produced by that one word was so overwhelming that, for a blissful moment, the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as they used to be. The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade at Verdun, and when we went out into the streets, it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground.

Waylaid at one corner after another by the long tide of troops, streaming out through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the various divisions of the unfolding freeze. First the infantry and artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and ammunition, then the long line of grey supply wagons, and finally the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All the story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that endless, silent flow to the front, and we were to read it again, a few days later, in the terse announcement of renewed activity about sweep, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between Perth and Beaujure. End of Chapter 2

Chapter 3 of Fighting France This Librevox recording is in the public domain Recording by Elizabeth Clette Fighting France From Dunkirk to Belfour By Edith Wharton Chapter 3 In Lorenne and the Vuges

Nonseil, May 13, 1915 Beside me on my writing table stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly, round-faced pink peonies of the village garden. They were picked this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerebe Vieux, a house so calcined and convulsed, that, for epithets dire enough to fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet, gloating over the fall of a city of idolaters. Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and streets of such murdered houses, through town after town, spread out in its last writhings, and before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that

were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point to the stale allegory of unconscious nature, veiling man's havoc. They are put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy, coming back to replant and rebuild the wilderness. Last March in the Argonne, the towns we passed through seemed quite dead, but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We were following another track of the invasion, one of the huge tiger scratches that the beast flung over the land last September, between Vitrire Francois and Barle-Ducke.

Etrepi, parnieu, Cermez Leban, Anderne are the names of this group of victims. Cermez, a pretty watering place along with you. the other's large villages, fringed with farms, and all now mere scrofulous blotches on the soft spring scene. But in many we heard the sound of hammers, and saw bricklayers and masons at work. Even in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life—children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautious older face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins.

In one place an ancient tram-car had been converted into a café and labelled—and labelled the restaurant de ruine, and everywhere between the caucined walls the carefully combed gardens aligned their radishes and lettuce-tops. From Bar-Laduke returned northeast, and as we entered the forest of Commercy, we began to hear again the voice of the front. It was the warmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where we stopped for luncheon, the familiar boom broke with a magnified loudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashes, there was not a sound but the gnat's hum in the moist sunshine, and the dryad call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of the lane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their

horses flanks glinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept some cigarettes, and when they had trotted off again, the gnat, the cuckoo, and the cannon took up their trio. The town of Comercy looked so undisturbed that the cannonade rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These frontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their business with what one might call stolidity if there were not finer and truer names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is little business to go about just now, save that connected with the military occupation. But the peaceful look of the sunny, sleepy streets, made one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away. Yet the French, with an odd perversion

of race vanity, still persist in speaking of themselves as a nervous and impressionable people. This afternoon, on the road to Gherbe Vieux, we were again in the track of the September invasion. Over all the slopes now cool with spring foliage, the battle rocked backward and forward during those burning autumn days, and every mile of the struggle has left its ghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which the plowshare makes a circuit to avoid. many of the villages have been partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape in its first sweet leafiness is so alive with ploughing and sewing and all the natural tasks of spring that the war-scars seem like traces of a long-past woe, and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of Gerbvier that we breathed again the choking air of present horror.

Gerville, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the mirth, must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted up between scattered houses and gardens to the great Louis Cateau's chateau above the town and the church that balanced it. So much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley, but when one enters the town, all perspective is lost in chaos. Gerville has taken to herself the title of the martyr town, an honor to which may be able to many sister victims might dispute her claim. But as a sensational image of havoc, it seems improbable that any can surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up from the depths, and hurled down from the skies, as though she had perished in some monstrous clash

of earthquake and tornado, and it fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction was no accident of nature, but a piously planned and methodically executed human Indeed. From the opposite heights the poor little garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress. Then when the Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the nicely timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the fearless Teuton carries about for his land Lusitania's was tossed on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders, almost apologetically for German thoroughness, that

any of the human rats escaped from their holes. But some did, and were neatly spitted on lurking bayonets. One old woman, hearing her son's death cry, rashly looked out of her door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her flocks and lilies, and there in her little garden her dead body was dishonoured. It seemed singularly appropriate in such a scene to read above a blackened doorway the sign Monument Funébre, and to observe that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of a lane called La Ruelle des Orpheline.

At one end of the main street of Gerville, there once stood a charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door, deep roof, and ample gables. It was in the garden of this house that my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Ligegé, a former mayor of Gherbeier, who witnessed all the horrors of the invasion. Mr. Lijgay is now living in a neighbor's cellar, his own being fully occupied by the debris of his charming house. He told us the story of the three days of the German occupation, how he and his wife and niece, and the niece's babies, took to their cellar while the Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a door into the stable-yard, they saw that the soldiers

suspected they were within, and were trying to get at them. Luckily, the incendiaries had heaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and the blaze was so hot that they could not reach the door. Between the arch of the doorway and the door itself was a a half-moon opening, and Mr. Liege and his family, during three days and three nights, broke up all the barrels in the cellar, and threw the bits out through the opening to feed the fire in the yard. Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that the ruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash for safety. The house was on the edge of the town, and the women and children managed to get away into the country. But Mr. Liege was surprised in his garden

by a German soldier. He made a rush for the high wall of the adjoining cemetery, and and scrambling over it slipped down between the wall and a big granite cross. The cross was covered with the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners, and with these opportune mementos, Mr. Liegegé roofed himself in, lying wedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon till night, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were hunting for him among the gravestones. Luckily it was their last day at Gerebe Vieux, and the German retreat saved his life. Even in Gereb Vieux we saw no worse scene of destruction. than the particular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story. He looked

about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contorted iron. "'This was my dining-room,' he said. "'There were some good old panelling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been a wedding-present for my grandfather.' He led us into another black pit. "'This was our sitting-room. You see what a view we had.' He sighed and added philosophically, "'I suppose we were too well off. I I even had an electric light out there on the terrace to read my paper by on summer evenings. Yes, we were too well off. That was all. Meanwhile all the town had been read with horror, flame and shot and tortures unnameable,

and at the other end of the long street, a woman, a sister of charity, had held her own like Sir Gabriel at Claremont on Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children about her, and interposing her short, stout figure between them and the fury of the German. We found her in her hospice, a ruddy, indomitable woman who related with a quick indignation more thrilling than invective, the hideous details of the bloody three days. But that already belongs to the past, and at present she is much more concerned with the task of clothing and feeding Gerebe Vieh. For two-thirds of the population have already come home.

That is what they call the return to this desert. You see, Sir Jules, explained, there are the crops to sow, the gardens to take. They had to come back. The government is building wooden shelters for them, and people will surely send us beds and linen." Of course they would. One felt as one listened. Heavy boots, too! Boots for field-laborers! We want them for women as well as men—like these!—Sir Julie, smiling, turned up a hobnailed soul. I have directed all the work on our hospice farm myself. All the women are working in the fields. We must take the place of the men."

I seemed to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints of her sturdy boots. May 14th. Nolcille, the most beautiful town in France, has never been as beautiful as now. Coming back to it last evening from a round of ruins, one felt as if the humbler sisters sacrificed to spare it were pleading with one not to forget them in the contemplation of its dearly-bought perfection. The last time I looked out on the great architectural setting of the Place Stannisla was on a hot July evening, the evening of the National Fet. The square and the avenues leading to it

swarmed with people, and as darkness fell the balanced lines of arches and palaces sprang out in many-colored light. Garlands of lamps looped the arcades leading into the Place de la Carriere, peacock-colored fires flared from the arch of triumph, long curves of radiance beat like wings over the thickets of the park, the sculptures of the fountains, the brown and gold foliation of Jean d'Amour's great gates, and under this roofing of light was the murmur of a happy crowd carelessly celebrating the tradition of half-forgotten victories. Now at sunset—all life ceases in Nancy, and veil after veil of silence comes down on the deserted place and its empty perspectives.

Last night by nine the few lingering lights and the streets had been put out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over the city like a canopy of velvet. Then, from some remote point, the arc of a searchlight swept the sky, laid a fugitive pallor on darkened palace fronts, a gleam of gold on invisible gates, trembled across the black vault and vanished, leaving it still blacker. When we came out of the darkened restaurant on the corner of the square, and the iron curtain of the entrance had been hastily dropped on us, we stood in such complete night that it took a waiter's friendly hand to guide us to the curbstone.

Then, as we grew used to the darkness, we saw it lying still more densely under the colonnade of the Place de la Carrier and the clipped trees beyond. The ordered masses of architecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and the black sky faintly strewn with stars, seemed to overarch an enchanted city. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the sound of the cannon began may fourteenth luncheon with a general staff in an old bourgeois house of a little town as sleepy as cranford in the warm-walled gardens everything was blooming at once laburnums lilacs red hawthorn Banksia roses, and all the pleasant border plants that go with box and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring roll-call with such a rush. Upstairs in the Empire Bedroom which the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench plans, airplane photographs, and all the documentation of modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the untroubled, continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life.

We started early for Mousson, on the Moselle, the ruined hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its foot. Our road ran below the long range of the Grand Couronne, the line of hills curving southeast from Pont-A-Musson to St. Nicolard du Port. All through this pleasant, broken country, the battle shook and swayed last autumn. But few signs of those days are left except the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible. and the pictures of war that made the Argonso tragic last March are replaced by peaceful, rustic scenes.

On the way to Mousson, the road is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a hilltop. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German invasion was finally checked and flung back, and the muse of history points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft inscribed, here in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic Hordes. a little way up the ascent to mousson we left the motor behind a bit of rising ground the road is raked by the german lines and stray pedestrians unless in a group are less liable than a motor to have a shell spent on them we climbed under a driving gray sky which swept gusts of rain across our road In the lee of the castle we stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs of Pont-A-Muzon, and the broken bridge which once linked together the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of the bridge showed that we were on the edge of war.

The wind was too high for firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood just beyond the hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenches and bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valley the eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared. But there the Germans were. drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watch-tower, and as one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls, one gradually found oneself reliving the sensations of the little medieval burg as it looked out on some earlier circle of besiegers. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became.

There they are, and there, and there. We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades. Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred with criss-cross ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp.

Suddenly an officer pointing to the west of the trenched hill said, �Do you see that farm? It lay just below, near the river, and so close. that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals in the farmyard, if there had been any, but the whole place seemed to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. They are there, the officer said, and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest cannonade had not made them seem as real as that. At this point the military lines in the old political frontier everywhere overlap, and in

a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal the German batteries, we saw a dark gray blur on the gray horizon. It was Metz, the promised city, lying there with its fair steeples and towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky. Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the river and entered Pont-A-Musson. It was by mere meteorological good luck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the guns would have been awake, and when they wake, poor Pontemuson is not at home to visitors. One understood why, as one stood in the Riverside Garden of the great Premonstratensi in Monastery, which is now the hospital and the general asylum of the town. Between the clipped limes and formal borders, the German shells had

scooped out three or four dreadful hollows, in one of which, only last week a little girl found her death, and the façade of the building is pockmarked by shot, and disfigured with gaping holes. Yet in this precarious shelter, Sister Teresia, of the same indomitable breed as the sisters of Clermont and Gerville, has gathered a miscellaneous flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by the bombardment, eclop, old women and children, all the human wreckage of this storm-beaten point of the front. Sister Teresa seems in no wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over her roof.

The building is immense and spreading, and when one wing is damaged, she is, she is damaged, she picks up her protégé and trots them off, bed and baggage, to another. "'I'm promenme malade,' she said calmly, as if boasting of the varied accommodation of an ultra-modern hospital as she led us through vaulted and stuccoed galleries, where carriotted saints look down and plaster pomp on the rows of brown-blanketed pallets, and the long tables at which haggard eclop were enjoying their evening soup. May 15th. I have seen the happiest being on earth, a man who has found his

job. This afternoon we motored southwest of Nancy to a little place called Menil Sir Belvite. The name is not yet intimately known to history, but there are reasons why it deserves to be, and in one man's mind it already is. Menil Selbelvite is a village on the edge of the Vos. It is badly battered, for awful fighting took place there in the first month of the war. The houses lie in a hollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into a plateau, with wheat and backed with wooded slopes, the ideal battle-ground of the history-books, and here

a real above-ground battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampled wheat. The church of Mainil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands, a plain little house at the end of the street, and here the Curé received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a chapel. The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it has something to do with the battle that took place among the wheat-fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of seventy-five shells.

The Virgin's halo is composed of radiating bayonets. The walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French relics, and on the ceiling the Curé has had painted a kind of zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Menil-sur-Belvite's handful of houses figures as the central orb of the system. Verdun, Nancis, Metz, and Belfour as its humble satellites. But the Chapel Museum is only a surplus expression of the Curé's impassioned dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the battlefield, where row after row of graves, marked and listed

as soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the names and death-dates of the fallen. As he led us from one of these enclosures to another, his His face was lit with the flame of a gratified vacation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing. He is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall of the Presbyter, hangs a case of carefully mounted butterflies, the result no doubt of an earlier passion for collecting.

His specimens have changed, that is all. He has passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary psyche. On the way to Menil we stopped at the village of Kravik. The Germans were there in August, but the place is untouched, except for one house. That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of the village, was the birthplace and home of General Lyotet, one of France's best soldiers, and Germany's worst enemy in Africa. It is no exaggeration to say that last August General Lyoté, by his promptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France.

The Germans know it, and hate him. And as soon as the first soldiers reached Kravik, so obscure and imperceptible a spot that even German omniscience might have missed it, the officer in command asked for General Liotte's house, went straight to it, had all the papers, portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in the court, and then burnt down the house. As we sat in the neglected park, with the plaintive ruin before us, we heard from the gardener this typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry. It is corroborated by the fact that not another house in Kravik was destroyed.

May 16th. About two miles from the German frontier—frontier just here as well as front—an isolated hill rises out of the Lorenmeadows. East of it a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon is the boundary between empire and republic. On such a clear day as this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its grassy top a little airplane cannon— stairs to heaven, watching the east for the danger speck, and the circumference of the hill

is furrowed by a deep trench—a bowel, rather, winding invisibly from one subterranean observation-post to another. In each of these earthly warrens, ingeniously wattled, roofed, and iron-sheeted, stand two or three artillery officers with keen, quiet faces, directing by telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four or five miles away. as the place was, the men who lived there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different classes, and had received a different social education, but their mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly young, and their faces had the look that war has given

to French faces, a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the vanishing point of the great perspective. From this vigilant height—one of the intentest eyes open on the frontier—we went a short distance down the hillside to a village out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and puppies. Below the terrace, lost Loren, stretched away to her blue heights—a vision of summer-piece, and just above us the unsleeping hill kept watch—its signal wires trembling night and day.

It was one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves. Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a dark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We passed into the forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched and sodded and leafy, that they seemed like some transition form between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called Village Negre of the second-line trenches, the jolly little

settlements to which the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. This particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep winding bowels over which light rustic bridges have been thrown, and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real doors. and windows under their grass eaves, real furniture inside, and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the table, and everywhere

we saw the same neatness and order, the same amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long trestle-tables under the trees, tired, unshaven men and shabby uniforms of all cuts, and almost every color. They were off-duty, relaxed, in good humor, but every face had the look of the faces watching on the hilltop. Wherever I go among these men of the front, I have the same impression. The impression that the absorbing undivided thought of the defense of France lives in the heart and brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of their chief.

We walked a dozen yards down the road, and came to the edge of the forest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet village a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field, and was abruptly pulled back. Take care! Those are the trenches. What looked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line, and in the quiet village French cannon watched.

Suddenly as we stood there they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakable gur of an airplane, and saw a bird of evil high up against the blue. Snap! Snap! Snap! barked the mitrailleus on the hill. The soldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through the tree. and the tobe, finding itself the centre of so much attention, turned grey tail and swished away to the concealing clouds. May 17th.

Today we started with an intenser sense of adventure. Hitherto we had always been told beforehand where we were going, and how much we were to be allowed to see, but now we were being launched into the unknown. Beyond a certain point all was conjecture. We knew only that what happened after that would depend on the good-will of a colonel of Chaucer-A-Pierieres. who we were to go a long way to find, up into the folds of the mountains on our southeast horizon. We picked up a staff officer at headquarters, and flew on to a battered town on the edge of the hills.

From there we wound up through a narrowing valley, under wooded cliffs, to a little settlement where the colonel of the brigade was to be found. There was a short conference between the colonel and our staff officer, and then we annexed a captain of Chaucer, and spun away again. Our road lay through a town so exposed that our companion from headquarters suggested the advisability of avoiding it, but our guide hadn't the heart to inflict such a disappointment on his new acquaintances. "'Oh, we won't stop the motor. We'll just dash through,' he said indulgently.

And in the excess of his indulgence he even permitted us to dash slowly. Oh, that poor town! When we reached it, along a road plowed with fresh obis-holes, I didn't want to stop the motor. I wanted to hurry on and blot the picture. from my memory. It was doubly sad to look at because of the fact that it wasn't quite dead. Faint spasms of life still quivered through it. A few children played in the ravaged streets. A few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways. They oughtn't to be here, our guide explained. But about a hundred and fifty begged so hard

to stay that the general gave them leave. The officer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives the signal they dive down into their burrows. He says they are perfectly obedient. It was he who asked that they might stay. Up and up into the hills. The vision of human pain and ruin was lost in beauty. We were among the firs, and the air was full of balm. The mossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little waterfalls from the heights

set the branches trembling over secret pools. At each turn of the road, forest and always more forest, climbing with us as we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys that converged on slate-blue distances. at one of these turns we overtook a company of soldiers spade on shoulder and bags of tools across their backs trench workers swinging up to the heights to which we were bound life must be a better thing in this crystal air than in the mud welter of the argonne and the fogs of the north and these men's faces were fresh with wind and weather higher still and presently a halt on a ridge in another black village this time almost a town the soldiers gathered round us as the motor stopped throngs of shone Chaucer-a-Pierre in faded, trench-stained uniforms. For few visitors climb to this point,

and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presently expressed in a large, Vive! L'Amerique! scrawled on the door of the car. La Marique was glad and proud to be there, and instantly conscious of breathing an air saturated with courage, and the dogged determination to endure. The men were all reservists, that is to say, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age. For many months there has not been much active work along this front. No great adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination. It has just been months after month of monotonous watching and holding on. And the soldier's faces showed it. There was no light of heady enterprise in their eyes,

but the look of men who knew their job had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France till the day of victory or extermination. Meanwhile they had made the best of the situation, and turned their quarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy. Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yet seen. In the colonel's dug-out, a long table decked with lilacs and tulips was spread for tea. In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling saucepans over kitchen fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp furniture and household decoration. Farther down the road a path between fur-boughs led to a hidden hospital,

a marvel of underground compactness. While we chatted with a surgeon, a soldier came in from the trenches, an elderly bearded man with a good, average civilian face, the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd. He had a scalp wound which had just been dressed, and was very pale. The colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then turning to him, said, Feeling rather better now?

Yes, sir. Good. In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to the trenches, eh? I'm going now, sir. It was said quite simply, and received in the same way. Oh, all right, the Colonel merely rejoined, but he laid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out. Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, at the sign of the Ambulent Artisans, where two or three soldiers were modelling and chiseling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells.

One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing a ring with beautifully modelled Fond's heads. Another offered me a pickle-hobe small enough for mustard-seeds wear, but complete in every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an imperial fenning. There are many such ring-smiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste. But the two we visited happened to be Paris Jewelers, for whom artisan was really too modest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a red gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed to be

beating out the cheerful rhythm of, I too will something make, and joy in the making. Up the hillside and deeper shadow was another little structure, a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers. Here Mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fur trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral forest. Nearby was the graveyard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay their comrades,

the pair de famis who don't go back. The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favorite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeral tributes clubbed together to buy a monstrous, indestructible wreath with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon,

and many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves. It's their favourite walk at this hour,' the colonel said. He stopped to look down on a grave smothered and beady tokens, the grave of the last pal to fall. He was mentioned in the order of the day, the colonel explained, and the group of soldiers standing near looked at as proudly, as if sharing their comrades' honour, and wanting to be sure of what we understood the reason of their pride. "'And now,' said our captain of Chaucer, "'that you've seen the second-line trenches, what do you say to taking a look at the first?'

We followed him to a point higher up the hill, where we plunged into a deep ditch of red earth, the bowel leading to the first lines. It climbed still higher, under the wet firs, and then, turning, dipped over the edge and began to wind in sharp loops down the other side of the ridge. Down we scrambled, single file, our chins on a level with the top of the passage, the close green covert above us. The bowel went twisting down more and more sharply into a deep ravine, and presently At a bend we came to a fur-thatched outlook, where a soldier stood with his back to us,

his eye glued to a peep-hole in the wattled wall. Another turn, and another outlook. But here it was the iron-rimmed eye of the mitrailleuse that stared across the ravine. By this time we were within a hundred yards or so of the German lines, hidden like ours on the other side of the narrowing hollow, and as we stole down and down the hush and secrecy of the scene, and the sense of that imminent lurking hatred only a few branched. lengths away, seemed to fill the silence with mysterious pulsations. Suddenly a sharp noise broke on them, the wrap of a rifle shot against a tree-trunk a few yards

ahead. Ah, the sharpshooter, said Argyde. No more talking, please. He's over there, in a tree somewhere, and whenever he hears voices he fires. Someday we shall spot his tree. We went on in silence to a point where a few soldiers were sitting on a ledge of rock and a widening of the bowel. They looked as quiet as if they had been waiting for their box.

before a boulevard cafe. "'Not beyond, please,' said the officer, holding me back, and I stopped. "'Here we were, then, actually, and literally, in the first lines. The knowledge made one's heart tick a little, but except for another shot or two from our arboreal listener and the motionless intentness of the soldiers back at the peep-hole, there is nothing to show that we were not a dozen miles away. Perhaps the thought occurred to our captain of Chasseur, for just as I was turning back, he said with his friendliest twinkle,

Do you want awfully to go a little farther? Well, then, come on. We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down and down, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine. The sharpshooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafy silence but an intermittent drop of rain. We were at the end of the burrow, and the captain signed to me that I might take a cautious peep round its corner.

I looked out, and saw a strip of intensely green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on its either side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with them, and a few steps would have carried us across the interval, yet all about us was silence, and the peace of the forest. Again, for a minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate. Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myself in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled earth. We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the bowel.

We passed the lolling soldiers, the silent mitraillez. We came again at the watcher at his peep-hole. He heard us, let the officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of understanding. Do you want to look down? He moved a step away from his window. The lookout projected over the ravine, raking its depths, and here with one's eye to the leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last. saw at the bottom of the harmless glen, halfway between cliff and cliff, a gray uniform huddled

in a dead heap. He's been there for days. They can't fetch him away, said the watcher, re-gluing his eye to the hole, and it was almost a relief to find it was, after all, a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow. The sun had set when we got back to our starting point in the underground village. The Chosier-A-Pierre were lounging along the roadside, and standing and gossiping groups about the motor. It was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life they had left nearly a year

earlier, and had not been allowed to go back to for a day, and under all their jokes and good humor their farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality, the business of holding their bit of France. It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's single-mindedness is so strong and all who have had even a glimpse of the front. Perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting cigarettes and exchanging trench

jokes, the look is there, and when one comes on them unaware, it is there also. In the dusk of the forest that look followed us down the mountain, and as we skirted the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on the near side the men who had been made by it. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Fighting France This Librevox recording is in the public domain, recording by Elizabeth Klett. Fighting France, from Dunkirk to Belfour, by Edith Wharton.

Chapter 4 In the North June 19, 1915 On the way from Doulon to Montreux-sur-Mere, on a shining summer afternoon, a road between dusty hedges, choked, literally strangled, by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every few minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling, but through it. What a sight! Standing up in the car and looking back we watched the river of war wind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers, they swept on as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust the sun picked out the flash of lances and the gloss of chargers' flanks,

flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch of gold on faded uniforms, silvered the sad gray of mitrailleuses and munition wagons. Close as the men were, they seemed allegorically splendid, as if under the arch of the sunset we had been watching the whole French army ride straight into glory. Finally we left the last attachment behind, and had the country to ourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields of Artois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds, were weighed down with layers of elder blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted with woodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed to carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams.

The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep sea swell, and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. The sun had set, and the seat while was rolling in when we dipped down from the town of Montreux to the valley below, where the towers of an ancient Abbey Church rise above terraced orchards. The gates at the end of the avenue were thrown open, and the motor drove into a monastery court full of box and roses. Everything was sweet and secluded in this medieval place, and from the shadow of cloisters

and arched passages, groups of nuns fluttered out—nuns all black or all white—gliding, peering and standing at gaze. It was as if we had plunged back into a century to which motors were unknown, and our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck, and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to their sense of the picturesque, for the Abbey of Noville is now a great Belgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on its seclusion. Sunset and summer dusk, and the moon. Under the monastery windows a walled garden with stone pavilions at the angles and the

drip of a fountain. Below it, tears of orchard terraces fading into a great moon-confused plain that might be either fields or sea. June 20th. Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English that there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road. Even the villages look English. The same plum-red brick of tidy, self-respecting houses, neat, demure, and freshly painted, the gardens all bursting with flasking. flowers, the landscape hedgerode and willowed and fed with watercourses, the people's faces square and pink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language halfway between English and German.

Only the architecture of the towns is French, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably in the same great tradition. War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressions, as the motor flew on over the undulating miles. But presently we came on an aviation. camps, spreading its sheds over a wide plateau. Here the khaki throng was thicker, and the familiar military stir enlivened the landscape. A few miles farther, and we found ourselves in what was seemingly a big English town, oddly grouped about a nucleus of French churches. This was Saint-Omer,

grey, spacious, coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness. At the street-crossings, English sentries stood mechanically directing the absent traffic, with gestures familiar to Piccadilly, and the signs of the British Red Cross and St. John's ambulance hung on club-like facades that might almost have claimed a home in Palmaal. The Englishness of things was emphasized as we passed out through the suburbs, by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and along the roads. Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there is nothing so unlike the French way as the English. Even if all these tall youths had not been in khaki, and the girls with them so pink and countrified, one would instantly have recognized the passive northern way of letting a holiday

soak in, instead of squeezing out its juices with feverish fingers. When we turned westward from Saint-Homer, across the same pastures and water-courses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of the plain, and on the top of one rose the walls and tower of a compact little medieval town. As we took the windings that led up to it, a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression of being somewhere near the English Channel. The town we were approaching might have been a queer dream blend of Winchelsea and San Jiminiano, but when we entered the gates of Cassell, we were in a place so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind. It was not surprising to learn from the

guide-book that Cassell has the most extensive view of any town in Europe. One felt at once that it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from every other town, and would be almost sure to have the best things going in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon is exactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness. We found our hotel in the most perfect of Little Market Squares, with a Renaissance town hall on one side, and on the other a miniature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by gray carvings. The square was crowded with English Army motors and beautiful prancing chargers, and the restaurant of the inn, which has the luck to face the pink and gray palace, swarmed with khaki tea-drinkers

turning indifferent shoulders to the widest view in Europe. It is one of the most detestable things about war, that everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and absorbing. It was gay and terrible, is the phrase forever recurring in war and peace, and the gaiety of war was everywhere in Cassell, transforming the lifeless little town into a romantic stage setting, full of the flash of arms, and the virile animation of young faces. From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture. All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northern sea-mist, and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun, far off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped,

as it seemed, in summer quiet. For a moment, while we looked, the vision of war shriveled up like a painted veil. Then we caught the names, pronounced by a group of English soldiers, leaning over the parapet at our side. "'That's Dunkirk!' one of them pointed it out with his pipe. "'And there's Popurig, just underneath us. That's Furness beyond, and Ipre, and Dixmude, and Yipur.' And at the mention of those names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing of the angel to whom was given the key of the bottomless pit. That night we went up once more to the rock of Casell. The most of the most of the most of moon was full, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark, a staff officer went with

us to show us the view from the roof of the disused casino on top of the rock. It was the queerest of sensations to push open a glazed door, and find ourselves in a spectral painted room with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, their kits stacked on the gaming tables. We passed through a big vestibule among more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a long staircase to the roof, where a watcher challenged us, and then let us go to the edge of the parapet. Directly below lay the unlit mass of the town. To the northwest, a single sharp hill, the Mondesca, stood out against the sky. The rest of the horizon was unbroken, and floating in misty moonlight. The outline of the ruined towns had vanished, and peace

seemed to have won back the world. But as we stood there, a red flash started out of the mist far off to the northwest, then another and another flickered up at different points of the long curve. "'Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines,' our guide explained. And just then, at still another point, a white light opened like a tropical flower, spread to full bloom, and drew itself back into the night. A flare, we were told, and another white flower bloomed out further down. Below us, the roofs of Cassell slept their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the gardens, while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open and shut along the curve of death. June 21st. On the road from Cassell to Popering, heat, dust, crowds, confusion, all the sordid, shabby

rear view of war. The road running across the plain between white-powdered hedges was ploughed up by numberless motor-vans, supply-wagons, and Red Cross ambulances. Laboring through between them came detachments of British artillery, clattering gun-carriages, straight young figures on glossy horses, long fiddian lines of youths so ingenuously fair that one wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of war and lived. Men and beasts, in spite of the dust, were as fresh and sleek as if they had come from a bath, and everywhere along the wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of wagon-covers,

where the ceaseless, indomitable work of cleaning was being carried out in all its searching details. Shirts were drying on elder bushes, kettles boiling over gypsy fires, men shaving, blacking their boots, cleaning their guns, rubbing down their horses, greasing their saddles, polishing their stirrups and bits. On all sides a general cheery struggle against the prevailing dust, discomfort, and disorder. Here and there a young soldier leaned against a garden paling to talk to a girl among the hollyhocks, or an older soldier initiated a group of children into some mystery of military housekeeping, and everywhere were the same signs of friendly, inarticulate understanding with the owners of the fields and gardens.

From the thronged high road we passed into the emptiness of deserted Popering, and out again on the way to Epe. Beyond the flats and windmills to our left were the invisible German lines, and the staff officer who was with us leaned forward to caution our chauffeur. No tooting between here and Epe. There was still a good deal of movement on the road, though it was less crowded with troops than near Popering. But as we passed through the last village and approached the low line of houses ahead, the

silence and emptiness widened about us. That low line was Epe. Every monument that marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is a town without a profile. The motor slipped through a suburb of small brick houses, and stopped under cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another military motor waited there, the chauffeur relic hunting in the gutted houses. We got out and walked toward the center of the cloth market. We had seen evacuated towns, Verdin, Batonvillet, round la top, but we had seen no emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets. Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our footsteps echoed like the

tramp of a crowd. Our lowered voices seemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers who were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It seemed an age since we had seen a living being. One of the soldiers scrambled into the cart, and tapped out at two, and, on the cracked keyboard, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise. Then we walked on, and were alone again. We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best, like Pompeii. But Epe has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses

are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while nearby it is seem to be a disemboweled corpse. Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blank like owls surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wall-papers. Plaster saints pine under glass bells. Antimacassers droop from plush sofas. Yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls. It was all so still and

familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business. And then, crash! The guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor, frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished cityful, hung dangling before us in that deathly blast. We had just reached the square before the cathedral when the cannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of iron over the glorious ruins of Epe. The singular distinction of the city is that it is destroyed, but not abased. The walls of the cathedral, the long bulk of the cloth market, still lift themselves above the marketplace, with a majesty that

seems to silence compassion. The sight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase used soon after the fall of Lijéges by Belgium's foreign minister, La Belgique no regret Rieux, which ought some day to serve as the motto of the renovated city. We were turning to go when we heard a whir-overhead, followed by a volley of mitrailleuse. High up in the blue, over the center of the dead city, flew a German airplane, and all about it hundreds of white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky, like the marion. miraculous snowfall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew, on the trail of the tobe, and on flew the tobe faster still, till quarry and pack were lost and missed, and the barking of

the mitrailleuse died out. So we left Epe to the death silence, in which we had found her. The afternoon carried us back to Popering, where I was bound on a quest for lace cushions of the special kind required by our Flemish refugees. The model is unobtainable in France, and I had been told, with few and vague indications, that I might find the cushions in a certain convent of the city, but in which—' Popering, though little injured, is almost empty. In its tidy desolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laid a spell. We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for someone to show us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last a passer-by led us to a door which seemed the right one. At our knock the bars

were drawn, and a cloistered face looked out. No, there were no cushions there, and the nun had never heard of the order we named. But there were the penitents, the Benedictines we might try. Our guide offered to show us the way, and we went on. From one or two windows, wondering heads looked out and vanished, but the streets were lifeless. At last we came to a convent where there were no nuns left, but where the caretaker told us there were cushions, a great many. He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, through rooms that smelt of linen

and lavender. We passed a chapel with plaster saints in white niches above paper flowers. Everything was cold and bare and blank, like a mind from which memory has gone. We came to a classroom with lines of empty benches facing a blue-mantled virgin, and here, on the floor lay rows and rows of lace cushions. On each a bit of lace had been begun, and there they had been dropped when nuns and pupils fled. They had not been left in disorder, the rose had been laid out evenly, a handkerchief thrown over each cushion, and that orderly a rest of life seemed sadder than any scene of disarray. It symbolized the senseless paralysis of a whole nation's activities. Here were a houseful of women and children, yesterday engaged

in a useful task, and now aimlessly astray over the earth. And in hundreds of such houses, in dozens, in hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had been stopped, the heart of life had ceased to beat, all the currents of hope and happiness and industry had been choked, not that some great military end might be gained, or the length of the war curtailed, but that, wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things should wither at the root. The same sight met us everywhere that afternoon. Over Fernenburg, and all the little intermediate villages, the evil shadow lay. Germany had willed that these places should die, and wherever her bombs could not reach,

her malediction had carried. Only biblical lamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land. Your country is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Your land, strangers, devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. Late in the afternoon we came to Dunkirk, lying peacefully between its harbor and canals. The bombardment of the previous month had emptied it, and though no signs of damage were visible, the same spellbound air lay over everything. As we sat alone at tea in the hall of the hotel on the Place Jean-Barre, and looked out on the silent square in its lifeless shops and cafes, someone suggested that the hotel

would be a convenient centre for the excursions we had planned, and we decided to return there the next evening. Then we motored back to Cassell. June 22nd My first waking thought was, How time flies! It must be the 14th of July. I knew that it could not be the fourth of that specially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to be sure I was not in America, and the only other event to justify such

a terrific clatter was the French national anniversary. I sat up and listened to the popping of guns, till a completed sense of reality stole over me, and I realized that I was in the inn of the Wild Man at Cassell, and that it was not the fourteenth of July, but the 22nd of June. Then what? A tobe, of course. And all the guns in the place were cracking. at it. By the time this mental process was complete, I had scrambled up and hurried downstairs,

and unbolting the heavy doors had rushed out into the square. It was about four in the morning, the heavonliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumult, Cassel still apparently slept. Only a few soldiers stood in the square, looking up at a drift of white cloud, behind which, they averred, a tobe had just slipped out of sight. Cassel was evidently used to tobes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitement and not being exactly in tune. So after gazing a moment at the white cloud, I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door, and mounted to my room. At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over the sloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain, and suddenly there was another crash,

and a drift of white smoke blew up from the fruit-trees just under the window. It was the last shot at the fugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardens between the houses, and its secret presence there was more startling, than all the clatter of mitrailleurs from the rock. Silence and sleep came down again on Kassel. But an hour or two later the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump. This time it was no question of mitrailleuse. The wild man rocked on its base, and every pain in my windows beat a tattoo.

What was that incredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course, but the voice of the big siege-gun of Nijksmood. Five times while I was dressing the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled with a noise that may be compared, if the human-imagined. imagination can stand the strain, to the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop-shutters in the world. The odd part was that, as far as the wild man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effect resulted, and dressing, packing, and coffee-drinking went on comfortably in the strange

parentheses between the roars. We set off early for neighboring headquarters, and it was not till we turned out of the gates of Cassell, that we came on signs of the bombardment—the smashing of a gas-house, and the converting of a cabbage-field into a crater. which, for some time to come, will spare photographers the trouble of climbing Bissuvius. There was a certain consolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damage done. At headquarters we learned more of the morning's incidents. Dunkirk, it appeared, had been first visited by the tobe, which afterward came to take the range

of Cassell, and the big gun of Dixmude had then turned all its fury on the French seaport. The bombardment of Dunkirk was still going on, and we were asked, and in fact bidden, to give up our plan of going there for the night. After luncheon we turned north towards the dunes. The villages we drove through were all evacuated, some quite lifeless, others occupied by troops. Presently we came to a group of military motors drawn up by the roadside, and a field black with wheeling troops.

Admiral Ronark, our companion from headquarters, exclaimed, and we understood that we had the good luck to come on the hero of Deke's mood in the act of reviewing the marine fuselers and territorials, whose magnificent defense of last October gave that much besieged town another lease of glory. We stopped the motor and climbed to a ridge above the field. A high wind was blowing, bringing with it the booming of the guns along the front. A sun half-veiled in sand-dust shone on pale meadows. Sandy flats, grey windmills.

The scene was deserted except for the handful of troops deploying before the officers on the edge of the field. Admiral Ronark, white-gloved and in full-dress uniform, stood a little in a advance, a young naval officer at his side. He had just been distributing decorations to his fusiliers and territorials, and they were marching past him, flags flying, and bugles playing. Every one of those men had a record of heroism, and every face in those ranks had looked on horrors unnameable. They had lost Dixmoud for a while, but they had gained great glory, and the inspiration of their epic resistance had come from the quiet officer who stood there, straight and grave, in his white gloves and gala uniform.

One must have been in the north to know something of the tie that exists, in this region of bitter and continuous fighting, between officers and soldiers. The feeling of the chiefs is almost one of veneration for their men, that of the soldiers a kind of half-humorous tenderness tenderness for the officers who have faced such odds with them. This mutual regard reveals itself in a hundred undefinable ways, but its fullest expression is in the tone with which the commanding officers speak the two words oftenest on their lips, My men.

The little review over, we went on to Admiral Ronock's quarters in the dunes, and thence, after a brief visit to another brigade headquarters. We were in a region of sandy hillocks, feathered by Tamarisk, and interspersed with poplar groves slanting like wheat in the wind. Between these meager thickets the roofs of seaside bungalows showed above the dunes, and before one of these we stopped, and were led. into a sitting-room full of maps and airplane photographs. One of the officers of the brigade telephoned to ask if the way was clear to Newport, and the answer was that we might go on.

Our road ran through the bois triangulere, a bit of woodland exposed to constant shelling. Half the poor spindling trees were down, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows marked the paths of the shells. If the trees of the cannonaded wood or of strong inland growth, their fallen trunks have the majesty of a ruined temple. But there was something humanly pitiful in the frail trunks of the bois triangulair, lying there like slaughtered rows of immature troops. A few miles more brought us to Newport, most lamentable of the victim towns. It is not empty, as Eep is empty. Troops are quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor, knots of cheerful zoaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. But Eep is majestic,

in death. Poor New Poor, gruesomely comic. About its splendid nucleus of medieval architecture, a modern town had grown up, and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and the ruins of the Gothic cathedral and the cloth market. It is like passing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoric cataclysm. Modern Newport seems to have died in a colic. No less homely image. expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders. There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else on the war-front. On the left a line of palsied houses leads up like a string of crutch-propped

beggars in the mighty ruin of the Templar's Tower. On the right the flats reach away to the almost imperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of St. Georges, Ramescapelle, Pervais, and over at all the incessant crash of the guns stretches a sounding-board of steel. In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirty feet across, overhung by splintered tree-trunks, burnt shrubs, vague mounds of rubbish, and a few steps beyond lies the peacefulest spot in Newport, the graveyard, where the Zawabs have buried their comrades. The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the cathedral, and on their carefully set gravestone, and on their carefully-set gravestones have been placed collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some of the

most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and virgins that cover the whole slab, and over the handsomest virgins and the most gaily colored saints, the soldiers have placed the glass bells that once protected the parlor clocks and wedding reeds in the same houses. From Sad Newport we motored on to a little seaside colony where gaiety prevails. Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas along the beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches. It is one of the rest cures of the front. When we drove up, a regiment, O Repos, was assembled in the wide sandy space between the principal hotels, and in the center of the jolly crowd the band was playing.

The colonel and his officers stood listening to the music, and presently the soldiers broke into the wild Chanson des Juave, of the blank Zouaves. It was the strangest of sights to watch that throng of dusky, merry faces under their red fezzes against the background of a sunless northern sea. When the music was over, someone with a Kodak suggested a group. We struck a collective attitude on one of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed at us, the colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinning, pock-marked soldier. He's just been decorated. He's got to be in the group. A general exclamation of assent

from the other officers, and a protest from the hero. "'Me? Why my ugly mug will smash the plate?' But it didn't. Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round and took the road to La Pan, dust, dunes, deserted villages. My memory keeps no more definite vision of the run. But at sunset we came on a big seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw, along the seafront, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolish villas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shaw.

All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to have taken refuge at La Pan. The long street was swarming with throngs of dark uniformed Belgian soldiers. Every shop seemed to be doing a thriving trade, and the hotels looked as full as beehives. June 23rd, La Pan. The particular hive that has taken us in is at the extreme end of the esplanade, where asphalt and iron railings lapse abruptly into sand and sea-grass. When I looked out of my window this morning I saw only the endless stretch of brown sand against the gray roll of the northern ocean, and on a crest of the dunes, the figure of a solitary

sentinel. But presently there was a sound of martial music, and long lines of troops came marching along the esplanade and down to the beach. The sands stretched away to east and west, a great field of Mars on which an army could have maneuvered, and the morning exercises of cavalry and infantry began. Against the brown beach the regiments in their dark uniforms looked as black as silhouettes, and the cavalry galloping by in single file suggested a black frieze of warriors, encircling the dun-colored flanks of an Etruscan vase.

For hours these long drawn-out movements of troops went on, to the wail of bugles, and under the eye of the lonely sentinel on the sand-crest. Then the soldiers poured back into the town, and La Pahn was once more a busy commonplace bandre. The commonplace-ness, however, was only on the surface. For as one walked along the esplanade, one discovered that the town had become a citadel, and that all the Doll's House villas with their silly gables and sillier names—seweed, the seagull, Mon Repo, and the rest, were really a continuous line of barracks, swarming

with Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds of soldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, romping and wrestling like a crowd of schoolboys, or bargaining in the shops for shell-work souvenirs and sets of postcards. and between the dark green and crimson uniforms was a frequent sprinkling of khaki, with the occasional pale blue of a French officer's tunic. Before luncheon we motored over to Dunkirk, the road runs along the canal between grass flats and prosperous villages. No signs of war were noticeable, except on the road, which was crowded with motor-vans, ambulances, and troops. The walls and gates of Dunkirk rose before us as calm and undisturbed as when we entered the town the day before yesterday.

But within the gates we were in a desert. The bombardment had ceased the previous evening, but a death-hush lay on the town. Every house was shuttered, and the streets were empty. We drove to the Place Jean-Barre, where two days ago we sat at tea in the hall of the hotel. Now there was not a whole pane of glass in the windows of the square. The doors of the hotel were closed, and every now and then someone came out carrying a basket full of plaster from fallen ceilings. The whole surface of the square was literally paved with bits of glass.

from the hundreds of broken windows, and at the foot of David's statue of Jean Bar, just where our motor had stood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmoud had scooped out a hollow, as big as the crater at Newport. Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of unmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the raw wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel to the graceful Gothic Church of San Eloy, of which one aisle had been shattered. Then, turning another corner, we came on a poor bourgeois

house that had had its whole front torn away. The squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling bedsteads, heaped up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs, and stoves, and washstands, was far more painful than the sight of the wounded church. Saint-Alois was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the poor little house reminded one of some shy, humdrum person suddenly exposed in the glare of a great misfortune. A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayed aimlessly about the streets. Not a loud word was heard. The air seemed heavy with a suspended breath of a great city's activities. The mournful hush of Dunkirk was even more oppressive than the death-like silence

of Epe. But when we came back to the Plancho'Barre, the unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself. A handful of children were playing in the bottom of the crater. collecting specimens of glass and splintered brick, and about its rim the market people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up their wooden stalls. In a few minutes the signs of German havoc would be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils, and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation of the ruins, would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a saucepan or a butter-tub. Not once but a hundred times has the attitude of the average French civilian near the front

reminded me of the gallant cry of Calanthea in the broken heart. Let me die smiling. I should have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market of Dunkirk. All the afternoon we wandered about La Pan. The exercises of the troops had begun again, and the deploying of those endless black lines along the beach was a sight of the strangest beauty. The sun was veiled, and heavy surges rolled in under a northerly gale.

Toward evening the sun turned to cold tints of jade and pearl and tarnished silver. Far down the beach a mysterious fleet of fishing-boats was drawn up on the sand, with black sails bellying in the wind, and the black riders galloping by might have landed from them, and been riding into the sunset out of some wild northern legend. Presently a knot of buglers took up their stand on the edge of the sea, facing inward, their feet in the surf, and began to play. And their call was like the call of Roland's horn, when he blew it down the pass against

the heathen. On the sand crest below my window, the lonely sentinel still watched. June 24th. It is like coming down from the mountains to leave the front. I never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of Belgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by a cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grass and sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy

have held up a light to the world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come to life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse. In the harbor of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddess with a torch designated as Liberty enlightening the world. It seems as though the title on her pedestal might well, for the time, be transferred to

the lintel of that villa in the dunes. On leaving Saint-Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently, over the crest of a hill we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim, turbaned Indians, with delicate, proud faces like the faces of the faces of the faces of princes and Persian miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery, splendid horses,

clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all the glow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. Now and then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply-wagons, or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village, where children and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakers were selling hot loaves to the settlers, and when we had extricated our motor from the crowd and climbed another hill, we came on another cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat-fields. For over an hour the procession poured by, so like, and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago, so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and away from it

again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies, guarding the civilized world from the north sea to the Vosges. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Fighting France This Librevox recording is in the public domain Recording by Elizabeth Clette Fighting France From Dunkirk to Belfour

By Edith Wharton Chapter 5 In Alsace August 13th 1915 My trip to the east began by a dash toward the north Near Ream is a little town, hardly more than a village, but in English we have no intermediate terms such as Borg and Petitbourg, where one of the new Red Cross sanitary motor units

was to be seen in action. The inspection over, we climbed to a vineyard above the town and looked down at a river valley traversed by a double line of trees. The first line marked the canal which is held by the French, who have gunboats on it. Behind this ran the highroad, with the first line French trenches, and just above, on the opposite slope, were the German lines. The soil being chalky, the German positions were clearly marked by two parallel white scorings across the brown hill-front, and while we watched, we heard desultory firing, and saw here and there along the ridge the smoke-puff of an exploding shell. It was incredibly strange to stand there, among the vines humming with summer insects, and to look out over a peaceful country heavy with the coming vintage,

Knowing that the trees at our feet hid a line of gunboats that were crashing death into those two white scorings on the hill. Reims itself brings one nearer to the war by its look of death-like desolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the most tragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senseless disorganizing of innumerable useful activities. Compared with the towns of the north, Reams is relatively unharmed. But for that very reason the arrest of life seems that. the more futile and cruel. The cathedral square was deserted, all the houses around it were closed, and there before us rose the cathedral—a cathedral, rather, for it was not the one we had always known.

It was, in fact, not like any cathedral on earth. When the German bombardment began, the west front of reams was covered with scaffolding, the shells set it on fire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now the scaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there stands a structure so strange and beautiful that one must search the inferno, or some tale of eastern magic, for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has been warm to deep tints of umber and burnt sienna. This rich burnishing passes higher up, through yellowish pink and carmine, to a sulphur whitening to ivory. And the recesses of the portals and the hollows behind the statues are lined with a black, denser and more velvety than any effect of shadow,

to be obtained by sculptured relief. The interweaving of color over the whole blunted, bruised surface recalls the metallic tints, the peacock and pigeon iridescences, the incredible mingling of red, blue, amber, and yellow of the rocks along the Gulf of Aegina. And the wonder of the impression is increased by the sense of its evanescence, the knowledge that this is the beauty of disease and death,

that every one of the transfigured statues must crumble under the autumn rains, that every one of the pink or golden stones is already eaten away to the core, that the Cathedral of Reams is glowing and dying before us like a sunset. August 14th A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream running through it. Pampus grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths. How bourgeois and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinel challenging our motor at the gate. Before the door a collie dozing in the sun, and a group of staff officers waiting for luncheon. In doors, a room with handsome tapestries, some good furniture, and a table spread with the usual military maps and airplane photographs.

At luncheon, the general, the chiefs of the staff, a dozen in all, an officer from the general headquarters. The usual atmosphere of camaraderie, confidence, good humor, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come to regard as characteristic of the men. men immersed in the actual facts of the war. I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheon hours along the front. August 15th. This morning we set out for reconquered Al-Sace. For reasons unexplained to the civilian, this corner of old New France has hitherto been inaccessible, even to highly-placed French officials, and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road that led to it. We slipped through a valley or two, passed some place, flaccid villages with vine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over the shops

were German. We had crossed the old frontier unawares, and were presently in the charming town of Mass-Vos. It was the feast of the assumption, and Mass was just over, when we reached the square before the church. The streets were full of holiday people, well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war. Down the church-steps, guided by fond mammas, came little girls and white dresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in baskets slung over their shoulders, woolly lambs, or blue-and-white virgins. Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in their Sunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we saw active preparations for a crowded midday dinner. It was all as happy and parochial as a Hunsy picture, and the fine

old gabled houses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional setting for an Alsatian holiday. At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and started out across the mountains in the direction of Thon. The Vosge at this season are in their short midsummer beauty, rustling with streams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of furs and bracken, and of purple thyme on hot banks. We reached the top of a ridge, and hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out into the open to lunch on a sunny slope. Facing us across the valley was a tall, conical hill clothed with forest. That hill was Harman Spilerkopf, the center of a long contest in which the French have lately been victorious, and all about us stood other crests and ridges

from which German guns still look down on the valley of Thon. Thon itself is at the valley head, in a neck between hills, a handsome old town, with the air of prosperous stability so oddly characteristic of this tormented region. As we drove through the main street, the pall of war sadness fell on us again, darkening the light and chilling the summer air. Thon is raked by the German lines, and its windows are mostly shuttered, and its streets deserted. One or two houses in the cathedral square have been gutted, but the somewhat over-pinnacled and statured cathedral, which is the pride of Thon, is almost untouched, and when we entered it, Vespers were being sung, and a few people, mostly in black, knelt in the nave.

No greater contrast could be imagined to the happy feast-day scene we had left a few miles off at Mas Vaux. But Thon, in spite of its empty streets, is not a deserted city. A vigorous life beats in it, ready to break forth as soon as the German guns are silenced. The French administration, working on the best of terms with the population, are keeping up the civil activities of the town as the canons of the cathedral are continuing the rights of the church. Many inhabitants still remain behind their closed shutters, and dive down into their cellars when the shells begin to crash, and the schools, transferred to a neighboring village, number over two thousand pupils. We walked through the town, visited a vast catacomb of a wine-cellar fitted up partly as an ambulance and partly as a shelter for the cellar-less, and saw the lamentable remains of the industrial quarter along the river, which has been the special target of the German guns. Thon has been industrially ruined. All its mills are wrecked. But unlike the towns of the

north, it has had the good fortune to preserve its outline, its civic personality, a face that its children, when they come back, can recognize and take comfort in. After our visit to the ruins, a diversion was suggested by the amiable administrators of Thun, who had guided our sightseeing. They were just off for a military tournament which the blankth dragoons were giving that afternoon in neighboring valley. and we were invited to go with them. The scene of the entertainment was a meadow enclosed in an amphitheater of rocks, with grassy ledges projecting from the cliff, like tears of opera-boxes.

These points of vantage were partly occupied by interested spectators, and partly by ruminating cattle. On the lowest slope the rank and fashion of the neighborhood was ranged on a semi-circle of chairs, and below in the meadow a lively steeple-chase was going on. The riding was extremely pretty, as French military riding always is. Few of the mounts were thoroughbreds, the greater number, in fact, being local cart-horses barely broke into the saddle,

but their agility and dash did the greater credit to their riders. The Lancers, in particular, executed an effective, musical ride about a central pennon, to the immense satisfaction of the fashionable public in the foreground and of the gallery on the rocks. The audience was even more interesting than the artists. Chatting with the ladies in the front row were the general of division and his staff, groups of officers invited from the adjoining headquarters, and most of the civil and military

administrators of the restored Departement du Otrouin. All classes had turned out in honor of the Fet, and every one was in a holiday mood. The people among whom we sat were most Lausatian property owners, many of them industrials of Thane. Some had been driven from their homes. Others had seen their mills destroyed. All had been living for a year on the perilous edge of war, under the menace of reprisals too hideous to picture. Yet the humour prevailing was that of any group of merry-makers in a

peaceful garrison town. I have seen nothing in my wanderings along the front, more indicative of the good breeding of the French, than the spirit of the ladies and gentlemen who sat chatting with the officers on that grassy slope of Alsace. The display of Ote Ecole was to be followed by an exhibition of transportation throughout the ages, headed by a Gaulish chariot driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out, and replaced by a large, placid, white horse. Unluckily, a heavy rain began while this instructive number awaited its turn, and we had to leave before Vercindyx had led his warriors into the ring.

August 16th. Up and up into the mountains. We started early, taking our way along a narrow, interminable valley that sloped up gradually toward the east. The road was encumbered with a stream of hooded supply vans drawn by mules, for we were on the way to one of the main positions in the Vosges, and this train of provisions is kept up day and night. Finally we reached a mountain village under fur-clad slopes, with a cold stream rushing down from the hills. On one side of the road was a rustic inn, on the other, among the furs, a chalet occupied by the brigade headquarters. Everywhere about us swarmed the little

chasseur alpine, in blue tamichanters and leather gaiters. For a year we had been reading of these heroes of the hills, and here we were among them, looking into their thin, weather-beaten faces, and meeting the twinkle of their friendly eyes. Very friendly they all were, and yet, for Frenchmen, inarticulate and shy. All over the world, no doubt, the mountain silences breed this kind of reserve, this shrinking from the glibness of the valleys. Yet one had fancied that French fluency must be. saw as high as Mont Blanc. Mules were brought, and we started on a long ride up the mountain. The way led first over open ledges, with deep views into valleys blue with distance, then

through miles of forest, first of beach and fir, and finally all of fir. Above the road the wooded slopes rose interminably, and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three or four hundred together, stabled under the trees, in stalls dug out of different levels of the slope. Nearby were shelters for the men, and perhaps at the next bend a village of Trappers' huts, as the officials call the log cabins they build in this region. These colonies are always bustling with life. Men busy cleaning their arms, hauling material for the new cabins, washing or mending their clothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp kitchen, the two handled pails full of steaming soup. The kitchen is always in the most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at some distance in the rear.

Other soldiers, their job over, are lolling about in groups, smoking, gossiping, or writing home, the soldier's letter-pad propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist laboriously driving the fountain-pen received in hospital. Some are leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Paris paper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own French journal, the Echo of Ravain, the Journal de Poilu, or the Diablo Bleu. Little papers ground out in purplish script on Foolscap, and adorned with comic sketches and a wealth of local humour. Higher up, under a fur belt at the edge of a meadow, the officer who rode ahead signed

to us to dismount and scramble after him. We plunged under the trees into what seemed a thicker thicket, and found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a battery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring, and near even. Each gun hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom with his bride. We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sun and wind-burnt common, which forms the top

of one of the highest mountains in the region. The forest was left below us, and only a belt of dwarf firs ran along the edge of the great grassy shoulder. We dismounted, the mules were tethered among the trees, and our guide led us to an insignificant-looking stone in the grass. On one face of the stone was cut the letter F, on the other was a D. We stood on what, till a year ago, was the boundary line between Republic and Empire. Since then, in certain places, the line has been bent back a long way.

But where we stood we were still under German guns, and we had to creep along in the shelter of the squat firs to reach the outlook on the edge of the plateau. From there, under a sky of racing clouds, we saw outstretched below us the promised land of Balsas. On one horizon, far off in the plain, gleamed the roofs and spires of Colmar. On the other rose the purplish heights beyond the Rhine. Nearby stood a ring of bare hills, those closest to us scarred by ridges of upheaved earth, as if giant moles had been zigzagging over them, and just under us, in a little green valley, lay the roofs of a peaceful village. The earth ridges and the peaceful village were still German, but the French positions

went down the mountain, almost to the valley's edge, and one dark peak on the right was already French. We stopped at a gap in the firs, and walked to the brink of the plateau. Just under us lay a rock-trimmed lake. More zig-zag earthwork surmounted it on all sides, and on the nearest shore was the branched roofing of another great mule shelter. We were looking down at the spot to which the night caravans of the Chaucer Alpins descend to distribute supplies to the fighting line. Who goes there? Attention. You're inside of the lines, a voice called out from the furs, and our companion signed to us to move back. We had been rather too conspicuously facing the German batteries on the opposite slope, and our presence might have drawn their fire on an artillery

observation post installed nearby. We retreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the more sheltered side of the ridge. As we sat there in the grass, swept by a great mountain breeze full of the scent of time and myrtle, while the flutter of bruce, while the flutter of Birds, the hum of insects, the still and busy life of the hills went on all about us in the sunshine. The pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and the jokes and everyday activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war.

It is where it lurks like a mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has already turned for rest. We had not yet made the whole tour of the mountaintop, and after luncheon we rode over to a point where a long narrow yoke connects it with a spur projecting directly above the German lines. We left our mules in hiding, and walked along the yoke, a mere knife-edge of rock trimmed with dwarf vegetation. Suddenly we heard an explosion behind us. One of the batteries we had passed on the way up was giving tongue. The German lines roared back, and for twenty minutes the exchange of invective thundered on. The firing was almost incessant. It seemed as if a great

arch of steel were being built up above us in the crystal air, and we could follow each curve of sound from its insipients to its final crash in the trenches. There were four distinct phases, the sharp bang from the cannon, the long, furious howl overhead, the dispersed and spreading noise of the shell's explosion, and then the roll of its reverberation from cliff to cliff. This is what we heard as we crouched in the lee of the furs. What we saw when we looked out between them was only an occasional burst of white smoke and red flame from one hillside, and on the opposite one, a minute later, a brown geyser of dust. Presently a deluge of rain descended on us, driving us back to our mules, and down the nearest

mountain trail through rivers of mud. It rained all the way, rained in such floods and cataracts that the very rocks of the mountains seemed to dissolve and turn into mud. As we slid down through it, we met strings of Chaucer-Alpain coming up, splashed, and to the waist with wet red clay, and leading pack-mules so coated with it that they looked like studio models from which the sculptor has just pulled off the dripping sheet. Lower down we came on more trapper settlements, so saturated and reeking with wet, that they gave us a glimpse of what the winter months on the front must be. No more cheerful polishing of firearms, hauling of faggots, chatting and smoking in

sociable groups. Everybody had crept under the doubtful shelter of branches and our pollens. The whole army was back in its burrows. August 17th Sunshine again for our arrival at Belfour. The invincible city lies unpretentiously behind its green glaciers and escutcheon gates, but the guardian lion under the citadel. Well, the lion is figuratively as well as literally a lauteur. With the sunset flush on him, as he crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort,

he might almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the Osirbanapal free. One wondered a little, seeing whose work he was, but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize in heroic town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the world from New York Harbor. From Belfour back into reconquered Alsace the road runs through a gentle landscape of fields and orchards. We were bound for Danmarie, one of the towns of the plain, and a center of the new administration. It is the usual Grosburg of Alsace, with comfortable old houses in espaliered gardens.

Dull, well-to-do, contented, not in the least the kind of setting demanded by the patriotism which has to be fed on pictures of little girls singing the Marseillaise in Alsatian headdresses, and old men with operatic waistcoats tottering forward to kiss the flag. What we saw at Danmarie was less conspicuous to the eye, but much more nourishing to the imagination. The military and civil administrators had the kindness and patience to explain their work, and show us something of its results, and the visit left one with the impression of a slow and quiet process of adaptation, wisely planned and fruitfully carried out. We did, in fact, hear the schoolgirls of Dan Marie sing the Marseillaise, and the boys, too. But what was far more interesting, we saw them studying under the direction

of the teachers who had always had them in charge, and found that everywhere it had been the aim of the French officials to let the routine of the village policy go on undisturbed. The German signs remain over the shop-fronts, except where the shopkeepers have chosen to paint them out, as is happening more and more frequently when a functionary has to be replaced he is chosen from the same town or the same district and even the personnel of the civil and military administration is mainly composed of officers and civilians of alsatian stock The heads of both these departments, who accompanied us on our rounds, could talk to the children and old people in German, as well as in their local dialect. And as far as a passing observer could discern, it seemed as though everything had been done to reduce to a minimum the sense of strangeness and friction, which is inevitable in the transition from one rule to another. The interesting point was that this exercise of tact and tolerance seemed to proceed not from any pressure of expediency, but from a sympathetic understanding of the point of view of this people. of the border. I heard in Danmarie not a syllable of lyrical patriotism or postcard sentimentality, but only a kindly and impartial estimate of facts as they were, and must be dealt with.

August 18th. Today again we started early for the mountains. Our road ran more to the westward, through the heart of the Vosge, and up to a fold of the hills near the borders of Lorraine. We stopped at headquarters where a young officer of dragoons was to join us, and learned from him that we were to be allowed to visit some of the first-line trenches, which we had looked out on from a high-perched observation post on our former visit to the Vosge. Violent fighting was going on in that particular region, and after a climb of an hour or two we had to leave the motor at a sheltered angle of the road, and strike across the hills on foot. Our path lay through the forest, and every now and then we caught a glimpse of the high road running below us in full view of the German batteries.

Presently we reached a point where the road was screened by a thick growth of trees, behind which an observation post had been set up. We scrambled down and looked through the peep-pole. Just below us lay a valley with a village in its centre, and to the left and right of the village were two hills, the one scored with French, the other with German trenches. The village at first sight looked as normal as those through which we had been passing, but a closer inspection showed that its steeple was shattered and that some of its houses were unroofed. Part of it was held by German, part by French troops.

The cemetery adjoining the church, and a quarry just under it, belonged to the Germans, but a line of French trenches ran from the farther side of the church up to the French batteries on the right-hand hill. Parallel with this line, but starting from the other side of the village, was a hollow lane leading up to a single tree. This lane was a German trench, protected by the guns of the left-hand hill, and between the two lay perhaps fifty yards of ground. All this was close under us, and closer still was a slope of open ground leading up to the

village, and traversed by a rough cart-track. Along this track in the hot sunshine, little French soldiers, the size of tin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, their ant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies had not lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered looker on, the utter impossibility of picturing how the thing really happens. While we stood watching, we heard the sudden scream of a battery close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive with seventy-fives, and the piercing noise seemed to burst out

at our very backs. It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard, a kind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs of war simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadful majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade, but these yelps and hisses roused only thoughts of horror. And there on the opposite slope the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from the German trenches, and from the batteries above them came the puff and roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the little French soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to the dilapidated village, and presently a group of officers of dragoons, emerging

from the wood, came down to welcome us to their headquarters. We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper colony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs, and deeply roofed by sods, tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were scattered under the trees, and connected with each other by paths bordered with white stones. Before the colonel's cabin the soldiers had made a banked-up flower-bed sewn with annuals, and farther up the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under it, all of the colonel's. tapestried with ivy and holly. Nearby was the chaplain's subterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting with ivy-covered sides, and ivy and fur bows massed the front. This sylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the chaplain and the soldiers loitering nearby, were all equally eager to have it seen and hear it praised. The commanding officer, having done the honors of the camp, led us about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which marked the beginning of the trenches.

From the cutting we passed into a long, torturous burrow, walled and roofed with carefully fitted logs. The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice. The only light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasional narrow slit screened by branches, and beside each of these peep-holes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over it in case of emergency. The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself, in order to give a view of all the surrounding lines.

Presently the roof became much higher, and we saw on one side a curtained niche about five feet feet above the floor. One of the officers pulled the curtain back, and there, on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat a dragoon, his eye on a peep-hole. The curtain was hastily drawn again behind his motionless figure, lest the faint lighted his back should betray him. We passed by several of these helmeted watchers, and then we came to a deeper recess in which a mitraeus squatted.

its black nose thrust through a net of branches. Sometimes the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double, and at intervals we came to heavy doors, made of logs and sheeted with iron, which shut off one section from another. It is hard to guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings, but we must have descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its outer walls,

one or two partitions between the rooms, had been transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole. Below in the dilapidated rooms the usual life of a camp was going on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes or writing letters, or chuckling together—not too loud, over a comic newspaper. It might have been a scene anywhere along the second-line trenches, but for the lowered voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence of these helmeted watchers overhead. We plunged underground

again, and began to descend through another darker and narrower tunnel. In the upper one there had been one or two roofless stretches where one could straighten one's back and breathe. But here we were in pitch blackness, and saved from breaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket-light which the young lieutenant who led the party shed on our path. As he whisted up and down, and to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners, he remarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, and that it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outpost till one had learned the turnings. The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other.

A telephone connected it with headquarters, and more dumb dragoons sat motionless on their lofty shelves. The house was shut off from the tunnel by an armored door, and the orders were that in case of attack that door should be barred from within, and the access to the tunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost. We were on the extreme verge of the defenses, on a slope just above the village over which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier. The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy's lines, and the nearest trenches

were only a few yards away. But of all this nothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me. As far as my own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking peacefully up the cart-and-and-and-and track and the sunshine. I only knew that we had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among fruit trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people whispered as they do about a death-bed. Over a break in the walls I saw another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard. It was an enemy outpost, and silent watchers and helmets of another

shape sat there watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitely less real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputed village. The artillery had seen. ceased, and the air was full of summer murmurs. Close by on a sheltered ledge I saw a patch of vineyard with dewy cobwebs hanging to the vines. I could not understand where we were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemy outpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little, there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching from trench to trench, the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs of eyes, stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless line, from Dunkirk to Belfour.

My last vision of the French front which I had travelled from end to end was this picture of a shelled house, where a few men, who sat smoking and playing cards in the sunshine, had orders to hold out to the death rather than let their fraction of that front be broken. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of Fighting France This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Clette Fighting France

From Dunkirk to Belfour By Edith Wharton Chapter 6 The tone of France Nobody now asks the question that so often at the beginning of the war came to me from the other side of the world. What is France like?

Everyone knows what France has proved to be like, from being a difficult problem she has long since become a luminous instance. Nevertheless, to those on whom that illumination has shone only from far off, there may still be something to learn about its component elements, for it has come to consist of many separate rays, and the weary strain of the last year has been the spectroscope to decompose them. From the very beginning, when one felt the effulgence as the mere pale brightness before dawn,

the attempt to define it was irresistible. There is a tone. The tingling sense of it was in the air from the first days, the first hours. But what does it consist in? And just how is one aware of it? In those days the answer was comparatively easy. The tone of France, after the declaration of war, was the white glow of dedication, a great nation's collective impulse, since there is no English equivalent for that winged word,

Elan, to resist destruction. But at that time no one knew what the resistance was to cost, how long it would have to last, what sacrifices, material and moral it would necessitate. And for the moment, baser sentiments were silenced. Greed, self-interest, pusillanimity seemed to have been purged from the race. The great sitting of the chamber, that almost religious celebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of the whole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the imperial.

when one is carried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not know how long one is to be kept suspended at the breathing limit. But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring Elon. It is likely, after a while to come back broken-winged, and resign itself to barnyard bounds. National judgments cannot remain for long above individual feelings, and you cannot get a national tone out of anything less than a whole nation. The really The interesting thing, therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamity unheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, and what virtues extract from it.

The war has been a calamity unheard of. But France has never been afraid of the unheard-of. No race has ever yet so audaciously dispensed with old precedence, as none has ever so revered their relics. It is a great strength to be able to walk without the support of analogies, and France has always shown that strength in times of crisis. The absorbing question, as the war went on, was to discover how far down into the people this intellectual audacity penetrated, how instinctive it had become, and how it would endure the strain of prolonged inaction. There was never

much doubt about the army. When a warlike race has an invader on its soil, the men holding back the invader can never be said to be inactive. But behind the army were the waiting millions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches might gradually have become a mere condition of thought, an accepted limitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures. The danger was that such a war, static, dogged, uneventful, might gradually cramp instead of enlarging the mood of the lookers-on. Conscription, of course, was there to minimize this danger. Everyone was sharing alike in the glory and the woe.

But the glory was not of a kind to penetrate or dazzle. It requires more imagination to see the halo around tenacity than around Dash, and the French still cling to the view that they are, so to speak, the patentees and proprietors of Dash, and much less at home with his dull drudge of a partner. So there was reason to fear, in the long run, a gradual but irresistible disintegration, not of public opinion, but of something subtler and more fundamental—public sentiment. It was possible that civilian France, while collectively seen—we were simply that, seeming to remain at the same height, might individually deteriorate and diminish in its attitude

towards the war. The French would not be human, and therefore would not be interesting, if one had not perceived in them occasional symptoms of such a peril. There has not been a Frenchman or a French woman, save a few harmless and perhaps nervous theorizers, who has wavered about the military policy of the country, but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people.

One would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll. Though the French, being fundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuries they have invented than are the other races who have adopted these luxuries. There have been many more who found the sacrifices of personal happiness, of all that made life livable, or one's country worth fighting for. infinitely harder than the most apprehensive imagination could have pictured.

There have been mothers and widows, for whom a single grave, or the appearance of one name on the missing list, has turned the whole conflict into an idiot's tale. There have been many such. But there have apparently not been enough to deflect by a hair's breadth the subtle current of public sentiment. Unless it is truer, as it is infinitely more inspiring, to suppose that, of this company of blinded, baffled sufferers, almost all have had the strength to hide their despair, and to say of the great national effort which has lost most of its meaning to them, though it slay me, yet will I trust in it. That is probably the finest triumph of the tone of France, that its myriad fiery currents flow from so many hearts made insensible by suffering, that so many dead hands feed its

undying lamp. This does not in the least imply that resignation is the prevailing note in the tone of France. The attitude of the French people, after fourteen months of trial, is not one of submission to unparalleled calamity. It is one of exaltation, energy, the hot resolve to dominate the disaster. In all classes the feeling is the same. Every word and every act is based on the resolute ignoring of any alternative to victory. The French people no more think of a compromise than people would think of facing a flood or an earthquake with a white flag. Two questions are likely to be put to any observer of the struggle who risks such assertions. What, one may be asked, are the proofs of this national tone, and what conditions and qualities seem to minister

to it? The proofs, now that the tumult and the shouting dies, and civilian life has dropped back into something like its usual routine, are naturally less definable than at the outset. One of the most evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations are accepted. No one who has come in contact with the work-people and small shopkeepers of Paris in the last year, can fail to be struck by the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without things is practiced. The Frenchwoman, leaning in the door of her empty boutique, still wears the same smile with which she used to calm the impatience of crowding shoppers. The seamstress living on the meagre pay of a charity workroom gives her days sewing as faithfully

as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable atelier, and never tries, by the least hint of private difficulties, to extract additional help. The habitual cheerfulness of the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finest fortitude. In a workroom where many women have been employed since the beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late one morning that her only brother had been killed. She had a moment of desperate distress. But there was a big family to be helped by her small earnings, and the next morning, punctually she was back at work. In this same work-room the women, the women have one half-holiday in the week, without reduction of pay. Yet, if an order has to be rushed

through for a hospital, they give up that one afternoon as gaily as if they were doing it for their pleasure. But if anyone who has lived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen of Paris should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial and secret charity, the list would have no end. The essential of it all is the spirit in which these acts are accomplished. The second question. What are the conditions and qualities that have produced such results, is less easy to answer. The door is so largely open to conjecture that every explanation must depend largely on the answerer's personal bias.

But one thing is certain. France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any of her national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up. Therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try to single out whatever distinctively French characteristics, or those that appear such to the envy- alien, have a direct bearing on the present attitude of France. Which, one must ask, of all their multiple gifts most help the French today to be what they are and just the way they are? Intelligence is the first and instantaneous answer. Many French people seem unaware of this.

They are sincerely persuaded that the curbing of their critical activity has been one of the most important and useful results of the war. One is told that, in a spirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not to find fault. Nothing could be more untrue. The French, when they have a grievance, do not air it in the Times. Their form is the Café, and not the newspaper. But in the Café they are talking as freely as ever, discriminating as keenly, and judging as passionately. The difference is that the very exercise of their intelligence on a problem larger and more difficult than any they have hitherto faced, has freed them from the dominion of most of the prejudices, catch-words and conventions, that directed opinion before the

war. Then their intelligence ran in fixed channels. Now it has overflowed its banks. This release has produced an immediate readjusting of all the elements of national life. In great trials a race is tested by its values, and the war has shown the world what are the real values of France. Never for an instant has this people, so expert in the great art of living, imagined that life consisted in being alive. Enamered of pleasure and beauty, dwelling freely and frankly in the present, they have yet kept their sense of larger meanings, have understood life to be made up of many things past and to come, of renunciation as well as satisfaction, of satisfaction, of traditions as well as experiments, of dying as much as of living. Never have they considered

life as a thing to be cherished in itself, apart from its reactions and its relations. Intelligence first, then, has helped France to be what she is, and next, perhaps, one of its corollaries, expression. The French are the first to laugh at themselves for running to words. They seem to regard their gift for expression as a weakness, a possible deterrent to action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It has rather shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By eloquence I naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the dressing up of conventional sentiment. Elocence,

the fearless expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression of emotion, fearless, that is, of ridicule or of indifference in the hearer, has been an inestimable strength to France. It is a sign of the high average of French intelligence, that feeling well-worded can stir and uplift it, that words are not half-shamefacedly regarded as something separate from, and extraneous to emotion, or even as a mere vent for it, but is actually animating and forming it. Every additional faculty for exteriorizing states of feeling, giving them a face and a language, is a moral as well as an artistic asset, and Gerta was never wiser than when he wrote, A God gave me the voice to speak my pain. It is not too much to say

that the French are at this moment drawing a part of their national strength from their language. The piety with which they have cherished and cultivated it has made it a precious instrument in their hands. It can say so beautifully what they feel that they find strength and renovation in using it, and the word once uttered is passed on, and carries the same help to others. Countless instances of such happy expression could be cited by anyone who has lived the last year in France. On the bodies of young soldiers have been found letters of farewell to their parents that made one think of some heroic Elizabethan verse, and the mothers robbed of these sons have sent them an answering cry of courage.

"'Thank you,' such a mourner wrote me the other day, for having understood the cruelty of our fate, and having pitied us, thank you also for having exalted the pride that is mingled with our unutterable sorrow. Simply that, and no more, but she might have been speaking for all the mothers of France. When the eloquent expression of feeling does not issue in action, or at least in a state of mind equivalent to action, it sinks to the level of rhetoric. But in France at this moment expression and conduct supplement and reflect each other. And this brings me to the other great attribute which goes to making up the tone of France, the quality of courage. It is not

unintentionally that it comes last on my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thought out, and found necessary to some special end. It is, as much as any other quality of the French temperament, the result of French intelligence. No people so sensitive to beauty, so penetrated with a passionate interest in life, so endowed with the power to express and immortalize that interest, can ever really enjoy destruction for its own sake. The French hate militarism. It is stupid, inartistic, unimaginative, and enslaving. There could not be for better French reasons for detesting it. Nor have the French ever enjoyed the savage forms of sport which stimulate the blood of more apathetic or more brutal races. Neither prize-fighting nor

bull-fighting is of the soil in France, and Frenchmen do not settle their private differences impromptu with their fists. They do it logically, and with deliberation, on the dueling ground. But when a national danger threatens, they instantly become what they proudly and justly call themselves, a warlike nation, and apply to the business in hand the ardor, the imagination, the perseverance that have made them for centuries the great creative force of civilization. Every French soldier knows why he is fighting, and why, at this moment, physical courage is the first quality demanded of him. Every French woman knows why war is being waged, and why her moral courage is needed to supplement the soldier's contempt of death.

The women of France are supplying this moral courage in act as well as in words. French women as a rule are perhaps less instinctively courageous in the elementary sense than their Anglo-Saxon sisters. They are afraid of more things and are less ashamed of showing their fear. The French mother coddles her children, the boys as well as the girls. When they tumble and bark their knees they are expected to cry, and are not taught to control themselves as English and American children are. I have seen big French boys bawling over a cut or bruise that an Anglo-Saxon girl of

the same age would have felt compelled to bear without a tear. French women are timid for themselves as well as for their children. They are afraid of the unexpected, the unknown, the experimental. It is not part of the Frenchwoman's training to pretend to have physical courage. She has not the advantage of our discipline in the hypocrisies of good form, when she is called on to be brave. She must draw her courage from her brains. She must first be convinced of the necessity of heroism.

After that she is fit to go bridle to bridle with Jean d'Arque. The same display of reasoned cut. courage is visible in the hasty adaptation of the Frenchwoman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs. Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since the war began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor once remarked to me that French women never really make good sick nurses except when they are nursing their own people. They are too personal, too emotional, and too much interested in more interesting things, to take to the fussy details of good nursing, except when it can help someone they care for. Even then, as a rule they are not

systematic or tidy, but they make up for these deficiencies by inexhaustible willingness and sympathy. And it has been easy for them to become good war-norses, because every French woman who nurses a French soldier feels that she is caring for her kin. The French war-nurse sometimes mislays an instrument or forgets to sterilize a dressing, but she almost always finds the consoling word to say and the right tone to take with her wounded soldiers. That profound solidarity which is one of the results of conscription flowers in wartime, in an exquisite and impartial devotion. This, then, is what France is like. The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope to the fighters, or passionately

bent above the wounded. The devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive, but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation, and on an unflinching estimate of values. All France knows today that real life consists in the things that make it worth living, and that these things for france depend on the free expression of her national genius if france perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force every frenchman perishes with her and the only death that frenchmen fear is not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of their national ideal it is against this death that the whole nation is fighting and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril which at this moment is making the most intelligent people in the world the most Sublime. End of Chapter 6. End of Fighting France by Edith Wharton