WE three correspondents---Corey, Gleason and I---had seen Clermont-en-Argonne on a previous trip to the devastated country behind the French guns; and twice again I had flashed past it on the road to and from Verdun. In the crushed and broken country of Lorraine and the Meuse, a ruined village is a commonplace. Once I visited in three days twenty-two such wrecks of war. But I doubt not that even without the happy and curious event which marked the fourth visit, I should have remembered the town for its beauty and its distinction in death.

We approached Clermont-en-Argonne, on that first visit, with considerable caution. It was under daily bombardment of long-range guns, our escorting officers told us. This was not the hour when the Germans usually fired. Nevertheless, a group of men in uniform may at any time draw a shell, and caution in preserving life---his own and those of soldiers or civilians under his charge---is hammered into the French officer. So we parked our car at some distance away, and trailed by covered paths through the ruined village.

Clermont has risen, since the very days of the Gallic chieftains, on a beautiful site. The historic gateway to the Passes of the Argonne, the northern tribes have always passed it in their southward marches. It crawls, terrace by terrace, up the edge of a plateau. Midway of the slope stands---or stood--a beautiful village church. When, coughing from the grey dust of walls newly ruined by the late bombardment, we came out to a terrace beside the church, we got a view which made us gasp. A green French countryside. checkerboarded with little farms, stretched out on three sides before us. Grey stone villages dotted the landscape. Here and there, what with the poor cultivation of these farms behind the guns, the fiery red poppies had conquered the fields, making brilliant strips of colour even to the horizon. Far before us, the landscape rose to a dark, thick, hill-wood---the Forest of the Argonne. First through the glasses and at length with the naked eye, we could glimpse a yellow thread, or a tangle of such threads, breaking the black-green mass of the hills. That was the Argonne section of the great battle-line. To the right was a break in the forest. That was the road to Verdun. Now and again came a noise like the bursting of a sound-bubble in the air---the great guns of the Argonne sector. And always to the right was a murmur, a disturbance of the atmosphere, from the direction where Verdun raged full force.

Of the town, nothing remained whole, except a fringe round the edge, and one house, quite uninjured, on the main street. Peasant tradition, already weaving romance about the catastrophe of August 1914, held that this was the residence of the local German spy. The legend was untrue, as we learned later. It was spared, when the Germans burned the town, for the same reason that the Hôtel de Ville at Louvain remains to the world---it was German headquarters.

There were the old ruins of 1914, and the double ruins of 1916. Part of the walls still stood, as these thick stone walls of France will stand after a bombardment---the tiled roofs fallen in, the windows gaping, the red poppies blowing between piles of débris. But here and there the stones had been reduced to pebbles and powder by the recent bombardment. Wherever the shells had spared the soil noble trees flourished amidst the green herbage of France, the abundant.

We entered the church. It had been a beautiful thing, erected as it was by some cathedral-builder in the age before Gothic died. The roof gaped; the pillars and arches were broken, or stripped of their carving. The rains had been pouring in for two winters, and the stumps of pillars, the broken flags of the pavement, even the carved baptismal font, were thick with moss. At one place, where light from the fallen roof fell direct, a cluster of poppies grew and bloomed. The main doorway was ruined; but a beautiful side-portal, facing up the hill, had escaped undamaged, to show what the church had been. From above the door a singularly sweet little Virgin, carved with all the sincerity of old Lorraine sculpture, smiled down upon us. So, after one last sweep of that landscape, whereon the dancing light of France fell as in globules, in great crystals, we threaded our way back to the automobile.

We were unaware, then, that a single inhabitant remained in Clermont. We learned it only by accident as we started north on another trip, for the purpose of talking first-hand with peasants and townspeople about the German occupation of 1914. Our cicerone, M. Hovelaque of the Department of Public Instruction, learned quite by chance from a confrère that M. Jacquemet, mayor of the town, and Mme Jacquemet, were standing-by. The Republic had been pleased to confer upon M. Jacquemet, already a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the Grand Rosette of the Legion. We might, if we were going that way, inform him---the official notice would arrive in a few days. No one who has not lived in France can appreciate what such a decoration means to your Frenchman. After that, we would have missed any other town on our itinerary sooner than Clermont-en-Argonne.

We found M. and Mme Jacquemet in a hut at a little distance from the town. The site was picturesque enough; but I shall not of course describe it. He came out to greet us from a vine-covered doorway. This man-who-stood-by proved to be old and very lame. He walked on crutches; he had an extension on the sole of one boot. His was one of the fine, clean-sculptured, intelligent faces characteristic of the best type of Northern Frenchman. His skin had a pallor which betrayed suffering. His dark, animated wife, younger by many years, walked beside him, a hand on his shoulder. She did not look French to me; only later did I learn that her father was English and her mother half-Spanish and half-Greek. In English a little rusty through lack of practice, she welcomed us to Clermont. Then M. Hovelaque and one of our escorting officers drew the Jacquemets inside the hut. They had business with Monsieur and Madame, which it was not for us aliens to hear. The door opened presently, and the group emerged, the mayor and his wife moist-eyed and exalted, and:

"This is a fête-day for us; you must all stay to luncheon," said Mme Jacquemet.

We protested; for entertaining unexpected guests is a difficult thing in the war zone. But officers from down the valley had informed them by courier that we were coming; and Madame had already made arrangements. Back somewhere beyond range of the German long-range guns, was a garrison with which they stood on friendly terms. The commander was lending us waiters and a cook, and two of the officers were to be among the guests. So no more protests, said Madame.

We entered the hut and sat down. Woman-fashion, Mme Jacquemet began to speak of her old possessions. They always do, these saving, home-loving French women up there in the devastated country; it is not the smallest pathos of the situation. "Ah, Monsieur, I had such lovely tidies " mourned an old peasant woman in a hamlet by Sermaize. "The wardrobe that my great-grandmother had for her trousseau---they burned that also," said another peasant woman to me. "The carpenter at Romilly has promised to make me another, but he is slow---he has so many orders for coffins! " So Madame Jacquemet, as she asked us to be seated, indicated two pretty brocaded arm-chairs among a half-dozen crude country chairs and a bench. "These are all I have left of my furniture," she said---though she said it almost as though it were a joke---"they happened to be out in the yard. I had been collecting old Lorraine furniture all my life, too---ah, beautiful things!"

Then, as such tales do, it came out in snatches of conversation---the story of Clermont. Mostly, Madame told it; but now and then M. Jacquemet, who understands English a little, would catch the drift and stab the conversation with a quick, nervous, descriptive passage in French.

When the enemy, on the first rush of the war, advanced through the Argonne toward Paris, there was no real fighting at Clermont, although the Germans bombarded the town. During the bombardment the Jacquemets lived in their cellar. Once, Mme Jacquemet missed her husband. She went upstairs to find him. He occupied his regular arm-chair in the living-room, and he was reading a newspaper three days old. "My dear," he said, "I won't stay in that cellar another minute. It's entirely too damp!"

When the bombardment ended, they found that everyone was gone except the inmates of a Home for the Aged, and themselves. The Germans were coming on; and there were French wounded along the roads. Mme Jacquemet opened the town hospital and cared for them, together with the aged paupers. When the Germans entered, she added German wounded to her cares, and she and the German hospital orderlies nursed them together. The occupation, at first, was perfectly decent. The officers were brusque, but not exactly unkind.

Just before the Germans arrived, Mme Jacquemet thought of burying her silver and some of the more valuable small articles in her collections. But she was afraid that if the enemy looted her house and missed the silver, it might start trouble; so she left the house exactly as it was. And on the second day the German commander informed her, quite coolly and abruptly, that they must take the old people away; the town was to be burned, and at once. She and M. Jacquemet---who, as the only responsible male citizen remaining, had assumed the office of Mayor---protested. Had not the dozen aged paupers behaved themselves? asked Monsieur. They had, but this was a matter of orders, replied the German. Even as he spoke, a squad began the work-proceeded from house to house lighting those incendiary lozenges which jump like fleas or live flame, setting fire to everything they touch.

No one knows why the Germans did all this. It seemed to serve no military advantage. However, M. Jacquemet has his theory, backed by pretty good proof, which I refrain from quoting lost it get some one into trouble. The headquarters of the Crown Prince, at the time, were just across the valley. The town, cocked up at the historic entrance of the Argonne Passes, was very conspicuous. He thinks---and as I say he has proofs---that the German Staff burned it to show His Highness that there was activity afoot.

Nevertheless Mme Jacquemet believes that in losing her house she has a stupendous joke on the Germans. The finest establishment in the town, it was headquarters for Emperor William I. and Von Moltke during the invasion of 1870. Here were drawn up the plans for the Battle of Sedan. Every summer before the present war, German tourists came in companies to look it over. Those who gave the orders were doubtless ignorant of this but after the fire was over, Mme Jacquemet took great pains to remind them. By mentioning this before the event, she might have saved her house, but I fancy she scorned to preserve her own property while letting her neighbours' burn.

The ruins cooled ; the Jacquemets returned to the hospital, which the Germans had spared, along with their own headquarters. The Battle of the Marne caused the invaders to retreat on the Argonne forest, abandoning Clermont, and the pursuing French army streamed through the Passes. There followed two years of exile at home. The Jacquemets lived in the hospital, doing all they could to help the peasant folk of the region and a very few courageous inhabitants of the town who had returned. In the third summer the bombardment of the ruins became more common. Shells fell on the hospital. Finally, the soldiers came over and removed the Jacquemets to the little hut where we found them. They lived with a scant collection of household goods, honourably looted from what parts of houses remained intact among the ruins. Some peasants came up in the spring and planted them a vegetable garden and fruit was ripening on unpruned trees and undressed vines among the ruins. "One lives very well here," said M. Jacquemet.

As we talked, the day's work was proceeding on the line. The French long-range guns were booming in the distance, and I could catch sharper and slighter sounds from below which might have been the German shells breaking on Clermont. It is not etiquette in the war zone to ask questions about such things. A commandant and one of his staff, guests from beyond to our luncheon, strolled in and proposed a walk to the edge of the village. From there, they said, we might perhaps view the morning's sport. "I'm going too," said Mme Jacquemet. "It may be dangerous, Madame," interposed the commandant. "A shell hasn't hit me yet," replied Madame, "and it's all luck anyway!"

The view was the one we had seen before, but the guns, though they thundered on, betrayed their presence by not even a faint mist. We were more interested in old St. Anne's Chapel, a quaint, crude, but beautiful piece of vaulted thirteenth-century work with distinguished and realistic old Lorraine statuary. Before it stands a linden which I swear is one of the finest trees in France. The records show that it was planted when the chapel was built it has therefore passed its six hundredth year. Both tree and chapel, standing as they do a little apart from the town, escaped fire and bombardment.

We found that the orderlies, when they called us to dinner, had set two tables together and spread them with a collection of dishes, varying from plain delft to egg-shell china, gathered up in the ruins. There were enough forks to go round, but not enough knives; the officers had to use their clasp-knives. Also, we drank our wine from tin cups. It is almost superfluous to say that the fare was good; your French cook makes a creation even out of army rations. And in the excellent grey wine of the country we drank to the two Republics, to M. Jacquemet, and to his decoration.

The bombardment kept up. "Music for the feast," remarked M. Jacquemet once. But mostly we never noticed it ; for the party was merry. The talk merely touched here and there on the war. We told the Jacquemets how Paris, since the German check at Verdun, the Russian successes in the Bukowina, and the advance at the Somme, had recovered a little of its old gaiety and "Ah, Paris!" sighed our hosts. Mme Jacquemet spoke once of her four sons---three fighting at the front, one a prisoner in Germany.

An officer in the party happens to be a professor of history, a noted authority on the Revolution and the Old Régime. A question about Clermont started him riding his hobby. This was historic ground, he said ---the past of France lay all about us: A little way across the line was Varenne. There, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were trapped when they tried to run away from the Revolution. Near where we sat, stood for ages the castles which defended the Passes of Lorraine. He dwelt long on a certain Yvetot of Flanders (I think that was the name), a lady of determined cruelty who was once Châtelaine of Clermont. She had unjustly executed some peasants. The prior of an abbey in the valley below sent up two curates to protest. Yvetot had them drowned in the castle moat. That put her under ban of the Church, a ban which was finally lifted when she did penance and built three chapels---one for each of the priests she had drowned, and one for the peasants. Of these, St. Anne's, which we had just seen, alone survived. Then Condé held the castle. When, after his rebellion, he made his peace with France, the King, fearing this stronghold, levelled it to the ground.

We had to break up the party rather early, for the officers had duties and we must catch a train at Bar-le-Duc. We parted with real regret on our side, and I think that the Jacquemets were genuinely sorry to have us go. As Madame remarked, you can't think how monotonous it grows up there. On the way out we passed the Mayor's hut. Sitting on the steps, waiting for him, was the figure of a woman in black. She had drawn her country shawl over her head, but her figure showed that she was old.

Her son, it appeared, had just been killed on the Argonne line---by coincidence, his regiment was fighting near home. So she had the poor consolation, uncommon now to the women of France, of receiving back his body. The Mayor of Clermont has sometimes strange duties to perform for the peasant people who look to him; and this mourning Madonna of the fields was waiting for a coffin.

This luncheon with the Jacquemets I have described somewhat at length because it rolls together, it combines, so many features of life in the devastated country behind the French lines. We heard much, in the autumn of 1914, concerning the suffering when the Germans swept in and out. We have heard little of the long, hard grind since then. France has had no energy left to restore to these people their homes and their industry so there they live, and must live until the end of the war, partly amid ruins, and almost always near the margin of actual want.

The district of which I speak, and in which, all told, I spent a fortnight talking to the people, comprises what is known loosely as French Lorraine, the Department of the Meuse, and the old battlefield of the Marne. If you care to look it up on the map, French Lorraine is the district about the city of Nancy, the Meuse district lies back of Verdun to a point south of Bar-le-Duc; while the battlefield of the Marne runs south of that point almost to Paris. Here, the German armies, advancing toward Paris in August 1914, made an irregular, impermanent new frontier, according to the plan of campaign and to the abilities of the French armies opposed to them. For instance, they never quite reached Nancy, though it is only fifteen miles or so from the old "frontier of 1870." There was fought the Battle of Lorraine, second to the Marne for slaughter and heroism. Below Verdun, they poured on for nearly fifty miles, until the Battle of the Marne drove them back to their entrenched positions near the border.

The whole story of German atrocities in this temporary occupation may never be told. I use the overworked word atrocities deliberately ; I have seen the evidence and talked to the witnesses, and the performances of the Germans were just that. A kind of mystery surrounds the whole affair. As I have said before, I once went through twenty-two ruined Lorraine towns in three days ; and in the same journey I glimpsed many others at a distance. Here would be one town wiped out of existence, deliberately burned, and usually with some slaughter of the inhabitants. Over in the next valley would lie a town untouched---not even looted. Why was one destroyed and the other spared ? The Germans would answer, possibly, that in the "bad" town someone had shot at their soldiers. But this does not answer the question. In certain places there was sniping in certain others, like Clermont, there was, I am sure, no sniping whatever. I am inclined to think, myself, that it all goes back, as the atrocities in Belgium go back, to the orders of the German War Department. Under those orders, an officer had liberty amounting to licence in treating with a subject population. If he were a decent man, well and good. If he happened to be a natural brute, if he entered the town drunk with wine or battle or in a state of nerves over francs-tireurs---good-bye to another French village. This is my only theory, at present, to account for the tragic, damnable things which happened in such towns as Gerbéviller and Nomeny and Lunéville, while neighbouring communities escaped untouched.

Of the facts, I am no longer in doubt. I have talked to the relatives of the dead by dozens. They spoke about these old griefs with a curious lack of apparent rancour. It was as though the destruction had been wrought by some force of nature, like flood or lightning. Yet almost always, somewhere along in the narrative, the tears would fill their eyes. There was the mother of Gerbévlller whose boy, thirteen years old, did not come home after the night of slaughter in that most heavily punished of French towns. So at dawn she and her friend went like Mary Magdalen and the other Mary to the place of the dead. He was there, his hands tied behind him with a tent-cord, and they would not even give me his body, Messieurs! " They had hanged him. She keeps yet the rope the French soldiers took from his neck when at last the Germans were gone. There was the Préfet of Meurthe-et-Moselle, who stood under the death-tree on the edge of Gerbéviller and told us about the hostages who fell on that ground-----fifteen of them, the youngest sixty-five. He had gone next day to view the bodies-no one had dared take them away. The Germans shot these old men against the tree in batches of five. One had been rolling a cigarette as he died probably he was trying to keep his nerve. Here the voice of the Préfet broke. Again, it was the old lady of Lunéville, summoned to the Mayor's office to tell us how her twelve- and thirteen-year-old grandsons died when the Germans, in some sudden panic not uninspired by alcohol, mauled the Jewish quarter and its environs. It was a rainy day: she and her five-year-old granddaughter, who came with her, were carrying flimsy little country umbrellas with foolish little dogs' heads for handles. When we began to question her, she burst into tears. The little girl caught the infection, as children will for five minutes grandmother and grandchild stood holding their umbrellas and crying into their shawls as though their hearts would break. There was the girl who had been dishonoured. She wept too; and between her brows was a set, unnatural furrow such as marks the insane.

Their stories, in detail, have probably reached the English-speaking public long ago, for there were daily newspaper correspondents on this trip. However, I must linger on one and this I remember most because Mlle Procès, the surviving girl-victim, did not weep as she talked. She told her story dully and briefly, this quiet, pretty young daughter of the Provincial aristocracy, as one who has sustained a grief as much too deep for remembrance as for tears. But Father Paul Viller, the village curé of Triaucourt, an external witness of this tragedy, told it more at length ; and I follow his narrative.

He had become, by right of character, the acting Mayor of Triaucourt. After the bombardment, which killed a few citizens, the Germans came; and at first, bar a little looting, there was comparative order. Then, one morning, a German officer came down the street in charge of a German private, of this Mile Hélène Procès and of her mother. The women were crying.

"What is the reputation of these women in the village?" asked the officer.

"It is the very highest," replied the priest.

"I thought so," said the officer. "This soldier has been annoying this girl. I will have him reprimanded." And he released the women, who went home.

"I noticed the soldier then," said Father Viler, in his nervous, expressive French, "for his face---so brutal, gentlemen, so fierce, so savage!"

A quarter of an hour later, as the priest was giving the last rites to a dying soldier, he heard firing, growing in intensity, near the Procès residence. The Germans were burning and killing in the row of houses across the street.

M. Procès was at the war with the Territorials. In the house of Mme Procès lived Mlle Mennhaud her sister, the elder Mme Procès, her mother-in-law, and Hélène her daughter. The four women gathered their valuables together, and ran out of the back door. Their yard is bordered by a wire fence. Mlle Hélène Procès, younger and swifter than the others, put up a stepladder and scrambled over this obstacle. She was helping her aunt across, when a rifle began to whip from a balcony near by. Mlle Mennhaud tumbled into her niece's arms literally, her whole brain was blown out Mme Procès, her mother, fell dead across the fence; her aged grandmother crumpled up, dead also, in the yard. Mlle Procès cannot remember what happened next, except that she crawled a long time through the cabbages of the next yard, with the bullets splashing about her. When it was all over, when the neighbours dared venture out, they found Mlle Procès in a state of temporary madness. To complete the tragedy, it was nearly a year before M. Procès got leave and revisited the spot where his home, his mother and his wife had been when he marched off to war.

The German excuse was the customary one---somebody fired on them. The townspeople declare that the soldier "of ferocious aspect" who was reprimanded for insulting Mlle Procès, himself fired the shot which gave occasion for starting the massacre. But no one ever alleged that any shots came from the Procès' house.

All that happened in the first month of the war. Perhaps the atrocity feature of the German stay in Lorraine and the Meuse has been proved to the world, and I have no need to deal further with the matter. Nevertheless, it is the historical background to life in the devastated regions.

It is one strength of the French in this war that they are rooted in the soil. They love the home acre as they love their families. They often embarrass their army by sticking to bombarded villages when in all prudence they should go away. Still, most of them did get out during the bombardments which preceded the German occupation, during that occupation, or during the period when the enemy upon withdrawal was destroying the towns. The dust had hardly settled from the German retreat, the ruins were scarcely cold, when they began to crawl back again. Usually there was nothing left but the cellars and here is a peculiarity of French building which has served the people well in troubled times. A cellar, in Northern France, is not one of our cemented holes in the ground. It is a stout vault of brick and concrete. It survives, usually, a bombardment which blows up every stone of the superstructure. Roofed over, so as to turn the rain, it serves very well for a human habitation.

In the existing state of France there was neither money nor labour to rebuild. But the people managed somehow. They doubled up in the few houses which had escaped destruction. They patched the outbuildings or parts of houses not so far destroyed but that they were susceptible of jury repairs. Such towns as had depended on small factories for their existence shrank in population, because the factories were destroyed or closed. But the little agricultural centres came back to something like their old population, minus, of course, the able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-seven years of age.

No one in France could help them much to restore their homes hut there came help from outside. The British Society of Friends---the Quakers---disbelievers in war, barred by their creed from taking part in military work, started to put the devastated towns back on the map. The job is so enormous that they have not been able to go very far---if you want a parallel, imagine that a private association had tried to rebuild San Francisco. Nevertheless, they have accomplished a great deal. Sermaize-les-Bains stands as an example. This town, of about 2,700 inhabitants, was a watering-place before the war; it had also a beet-sugar factory, handling the crops of the surrounding region. The Germans spared the factory. I have wandered a great deal, first and last, in the Belgian and French territory devastated by the Germans; and while I never heard of their sparing a church, I noticed that they often spared the factories and always the breweries. Further, a big, flimsy, wooden bathing-hotel near the springs was a German barracks, so that escaped. Sermaize was a good town in which to begin operations, for its sugar-factory was vital to the peasants. The Quakers quartered in the hotel all the people they could and then, whenever the military granted them freight-cars to haul materials, they began to set up little block-like brick houses of one or two stories. No one has had the time to clear away the ruins, and these ugly but comfortable structures rise grotesquely amid the tangled wreckage of fine and often beautiful old stone houses.

The church here, like that at Clermont, was a fine and irreplaceable example of country Gothic. The fire took the long nave; only the bases of the pillars are left, together with some sculptured inscriptions in black letter marking the resting-place of old lords of Sermaize. But though the roof of the transept fell in, its walls stood. These restorers of another faith erected a new roof. On a June Sunday of this year I saw the little girls of Sermaize sitting in white veils on benches made of boards and boxes, while the priest instructed them for their First Communion.

As a result, Sermaize after two years was back where a part of San Francisco was after six months. The people are living among ruins, but they have shelter and they are resuming industry. They tell you with pride that there are 2,200 people back in town out of the original 2,700, and that the number of men mobilized for the war almost makes up the difference.

By contrast, there is Sommeilles, a village unique in that every house was destroyed. Conflagrations seldom make a clean sweep. There are usually islands in the midst of the fire, or unscathed houses on the edge. Here the Germans persevered, restarting the fires as they died out. Part of the church tower remained, including the face of the clock. The hour-hand pointed to 9 and a sparrow had for two years built her nest on that hand.

The Germans burned the town "in reprisal," because a bridge near by, over which the French had just retreated, was blown up. They declared that the peasants did it. The peasants say that it was the work of an engineer squad, left for that very purpose behind the French retreat.

Sommeilles depends strictly on agriculture. This country is so thickly inhabited that a peasant proprietor usually lives not on his land but in a village near-by and these farmer people were the characteristic burghers of the town. We came upon it in a melancholy twilight, which made it seem the very abomination of desolation. An old peasant labourer whom we met at the cross-roads stopped to chat with us of crops and business in general. There was plenty of work, he said; in fact, too much. No one had enough men for the ploughing and the harvest. Then, too, it had been a bad, cold summer. But they could manage the man-problem with the help of soldiers. The real trouble was lack of horses. The war had taken most of them; the rest, even the very old ones, were worked to death. In the next village I found a proof of this shortage. An official Government placard announced a public sale of "réformé" horses---beasts wounded in action but still useful for some civilian purpose. They were divided into two classes. First were those so badly crippled that they could be used only for food. These were offered wholesale to butchers. Second were those who could be worked. These would go strictly to the highest bidder, but no person who had ever dealt in horses was allowed to bid, and no bidder might have more than two.

The Quakers had done a little housing work here though there were stilt people living in cellars. It takes labour and expense to set down a new house exactly on the ruins of an old; mostly, these little, bare brick structures stood on what used to be a vacant yard. One young woman, so housed, had cleared away the débris of her ruined home, had filled in the space above the vaulted cellar with fresh loam, and was growing a flourishing vegetable garden.

An old couple came over, presently, to welcome the visitors, and to chat about their prescrit state. He was seventy-eight----so old that he took everything, even his grandsons on the Great Line, with the numb philosophy of age. She, twelve years his junior, kept her spirited French interest in life. "If I can only live long enough, gentlemen, to see how it all turns out she said. "What will it mean ? Is civilization ended?"

As he told us about his affairs quite simply and frankly, we realized that we were talking to a ruined man. He had been of wealth and consequence in the community; he lived on the rent of several houses. They were all gone. His own house, exclusive of land, had been appraised by the Government at 45,000 francs. The couple were living in a kitchen left partly intact when the rest of the house went up in smoke. The great fireplace, characteristic of these French peasant dwellings, was their sole fireside; its mantel held a few homely ornaments and the holy statues which Madame had rescued somehow when the Germans began their burning. Burnished copper kettles hung along the walls; the floor was waxed until it shone.

"It's better than the fields where we camped when the Germans came," said Madame, "or than the cellar there where we lived afterward. But oh, I had so many pretty things!"

Then, for a farther stage of ruin and desolation, there is Gerbéviller---the "martyr town," the French call it. About that riot of massacre and rapine which marked the stay of the Germans, whole volumes have been written in France. I shall not repeat the story. Here dwells---and rules---Sister Julie, the heroic old nun whose combination of courage, mother-wit and practical peasant intelligence saved her hospital and a few surrounding buildings from the universal destruction. Every civilian privileged to travel in that region feels it his duty to visit Sister Julie, that he may see the Cross of the Legion of Honour which President Poincaré himself pinned on her habit, Her friends say that Sister Julie has grown very weary of telling her story; but weariness has not spoiled the effectiveness of her performance. Her fine old face, with its mixture of spirituality and peasant shrewdness, grows dark with horror and loathing or lights with humour and triumph. At the dramatic climaxes, she holds the pose of her fine, dark eyes like a Bernhardt. It is true romantic drama, this narrative of Sister Julie; for laughter chases tears as you listen to the tale of the massacres and the ensuing recital of what she said to the Germans.

Now Gerbéviller was a rich residential town. It had no industries except a small brewery---spared of course. The brewery still makes a little beer. A restaurant stood in that quarter which Sister Julie saved from the Germans, and some one has set up, on the broken foundations of a small hotel, a structure of slabs and rustic poles called the "Café des Ruines." Here the soldiers regale themselves on native beer. Also, a few shops ministering to necessities have opened in houses which the fire missed. Otherwise, Gerbéviller seems as dead as on the day when the Germans left. Nature is already healing the gashes of man. The Château of the Marquis of Lambertine, pride of the region, looks after two years as old a ruin as the Baths of Caracalla. The French have a way of training fruit trees over the walls of houses and gardens. Trees have a strange vitality. Even the hot flames of Gerbéviller failed to destroy these wall growths. In the very spring of 1915 they blossomed; in the autumn they gave fruit. And these green branches, climbing and crawling over ruins, lend a further air of antiquity to the relies of a recent disaster.

The whole job, of course, is too big for the Quakers. They have been able to give relief only here and there. And like Gerbéviller are the greater number of those ruined villages---wrecks for the present, their inhabitants still marking time in cellars or in corners of ruins.

The thing which, to the casual eye, moderates the desolation a little is the presence of the soldiery. Every one, probably, knows by now the routine of the trench warfare on the Western line---so many days in the front trenches, so many in the reserve trenches, so many in the rest station. For twenty miles or so behind the line many villages which serve no more immediate military use are rest stations where soldiers, recuperating from the grind of the trenches or the Hell of battle, quarter themselves as best they may. At least, there is some variety about this life of desolation. Regiments are for ever coming and going. Inhabitants of other French departments, as remote to your home-staying French townsman as China, march in, talking strange dialects, to tell marvellous things. They chum with the town dogs. They gather flowers with the village children. Of evenings they get a little pathetic imitation of home-life about peasant firesides.

They are gone presently ; and a new lot comes to take their places. All day, most likely, army camions, field-kitchens, ambulances, travel forward loaded and return empty. Regiments march past, the buglers, if it be not too near the line, saluting the inhabitants with marching-tunes like the "Régiment de Sambre-et Meuse," or the "Chant du Départ."

Also, war has brought variety of another kind. Wherever there are soldiers, there also may be bomb-raids. Often enough, this happens where there are no soldiers at all, or very few ; and, aerial bombs being foolishly inaccurate, more civilians than soldiers suffer.

The day we took testimony at Lunéville, there was a bomb raid. The town, a substantial place, stands near the present line. Every scouting German 'plane which manages to get past the French guard seems to drop an incidental load of bombs on Lunéville.

As we approached the town, we saw a black German aeroplane dodging from cloud to cloud, with the familiar little white puffs from anti-aircraft guns following it. There was scarcely any one on the streets as we rolled along. I remember only one woman, marching with her head erect as though defying the German lightning; but she presently turned into her own doorway. We stopped at a police station to inquire our way to the Mairie. There came. just then, four sharp but distant explosions, and we could make out the aeroplane, very high up, running into a cloud.

The largest church of Lunéville stands beside the Mairie. A big funeral was going on as we passed; the Mass was over, but the hearse waited, hitched outside, while the mourners like people who had taken refuge from the rain, were gathered inside the church door, craning their necks at the heavens. As we entered the Mairie, all the bells began to toll---"raid over." The mourners emerged, fell into line, marched away the street grew lively again.

M. Keller, the Mayor, was beginning the story of Theodor Weil, the celebrated German spy, when a policeman entered, saluted, and handed him, on a printed form, the report of the bomb raid. There had been no damage, except a few broken paving-stones.

"You didn't notice many people on the streets, did you ? " said Mayor Keller, rubbing his hands together with great satisfaction. ''We've arranged all that!" and he pointed to a proclamation on the wall. It announced that, henceforth and until further notice, whosoever was found on the street, after the official warning of a bomb raid, would be punished with fine, and, in case of repeated offence, with imprisonment. "That stopped it!" said M. Keller. "We couldn't make them stay indoors before, but now they're afraid of the fine!"

I had intended, on beginning this article, to avoid detailed stories of what happened two years ago; but I cannot refrain from touching upon the tale of Lunéville. When the Germans came, the townsfolk recognized among them an old acquaintance---one Theodor Weil, German commercial traveller, who had been "making" Lunéville for fifteen years, and was as well known to the business community as any resident. He wore, now, the uniform of the German Secret Service. He directed very expertly the quartering of the invaders. He seemed to have more information about the town than the natives. When, after a few days, the Germans decided to blow and loot some strongboxes, Herr Weil knew exactly where to go and how much money to expect.

The German commander made on M. Keller, the Mayor, the customary demand for hostages-five of them he wanted, the richest people in town. "I offer myself," said the Mayor. "Ah, but you're already a hostage," said the German; "we always consider the Mayor a hostage, apart from the rest."

M. Keller hesitated, for he was in a quandary. The two richest people of Lunéville, a man and a woman, were both more than seventy years old, and very feeble. Should he lie ? But Herr Well, who knew so weirdly much about the town, would nail the lie at once. So he came out with the truth, adding:

"These two are very old. In common humanity: you should take others in their places."

"We want the richest people---not talk " said the German. And the two old people were marched off with the rest.

Then followed a curious episode. A German soldier was found dead. The Germans laid it to the townspeople. They were about to execute the hostages and burn that quarter of the town where the body was found, when Weil the spy proved that a German comrade had murdered him in a quarrel over a woman.

So things rested until Saturday night, when a good many of the garrison got drunk. The commandant came to the Mayor. "You and the other hostages are to die," he said; "your citizens have fired on us---on me " "What is your proof " asked M. Keller. The commandant led him to the Jewish quarter. There lay an old labourer of the town, dead of a bullet-wound.

"I was standing near this man when he was shot," said the commandant; "the bullet was undoubtedly meant for me

"And you would kill us on such evidence as that! said M. Keller. "Here--put a German cape and helmet on me, and let me walk beside you through the town---if you dare. At the first shot---kill me!

The commandant accepted the challenge. There was no shot. Nevertheless, though they spared the hostages, they took vengeance on the Jewish quarter. In some manner, they calculated that the shot which killed the old labourer came from the house of M. Weil, the elderly rabbi of the synagogue---the identity of his name with that of the spy is merely coincidence. They sent out a destruction squad, and set fire, with incendiary tablets, to the Weil house. Rabbi Weil and his fifteen-year-old daughter tried to escape. The Germans thrust them back into the house at the point of the bayonet. They took refuge in the cellar, where they were suffocated. On succeeding events, our witnesses held so confused a memory that we could not patch together a consecutive story. The Germans burned most of the quarter and the "reprisal" turned into a massacre. Everyone who appeared at a window or doorway became a target. Mme. Kahn, ninety-eight years old, was killed in her bed. Her son, seventy years old, tried to escape, and fell dead on his door-sill. Twenty-eight people, mostly Jews, were killed, and nearly a hundred houses burned.

Who shot that old French labourer, no one knows. Before the Germans came, M. Keller had his policemen gather up every weapon in the town, from a sporting shot-gun to a rusty sabre. These were delivered to the Germans, who made a search on their own account. The Jewish men of vigorous years, like their compatriots of Gentile blood, had all gone to the war. Whoever knows the law-abiding character of the Jews, and whoever knows the repressed condition under which they still live in Continental towns, will hesitate to believe that the murderer was a Jew, and especially a rabbi.

This happened in the last days of August. On September 5 began the Battle of the Marne. By September 8 the advanced German army was in retreat. The people of Lunéville, cut off from the world, did not know this, but the Germans, thoroughly informed, must have realized that their stay was probably brief. For suddenly, on September 8, the German commander demanded, to requite the crime of shooting at Germans, a ransom or fine, or whatever you may call it, of 650,000 francs. It must be paid in gold within forty-eight hours," said the officer who brought the demand. Otherwise they proposed to loot and burn the city. "And if the sum is short," said the officer, " I will return and take extreme measures." "What if the shoe is on the other foot? What if we give you too much?" asked M. Keller, quite naturally. "Don't joke with me," said the German.

Now, in the nature of things, there was not much money in Lunéville. M. Keller and his city officials collected and counted for two days and nights. The bank gave the nucleus of the sum. One woman, hitherto supposed to be poor, brought 21,000 francs in gold to the Town Hall. A washerwoman gave two francs. When, on the stroke of the forty-eighth hour, the German officer arrived for the ransom, M. Keller handed it over in full. The German officer refused to give a receipt until his men had counted it.

Next day, the officer was back with a note signed "V. Lasser, Chief of Staff," which M. Keller has framed on his wall. It set forth that the sum was 180 francs 35 centimes short. Moreover 4,560 francs was in Austrian and Russian gold," which is valueless in our eyes." The sum must be replaced. "Tout sera l'affaire," concludes the note, "d'un quart d'heure" (All this is a matter of a quarter of an hour). If the sum was not made up by that time, the bearer of the note implied, the town would be looted and burned as a reprisal.

Possibly the Germans, who had all day been packing to leave, counted on this flaw in the ransom as an excuse for blowing the rest of the strong-boxes and safes, under Weil's direction. If so, they overlooked one fact: M. Keller is President of a bank, and has at any time access to its vaults. He rushed over, found enough good French gold to make up the difference, and counted it into the hands of the German before the quarter of an hour had elapsed. Hard on this, the bugles blew, the garrison fell into line, and the Germans marched away to their prepared positions on the border.

Six months later, a German agent named Theodor Weil was caught instigating insurrection among the Moroccan tribes, condemned by court-martial, and shot. The people of Lunéville believe, naturally, that he was their old acquaintance, to whom for fifteen years they had given confidence and hospitality.

The ransom, together with the looting, put Lunéville in virtual bankruptcy. It was two years before the schools could be reopened.

Nancy, ancient capital of Lorraine, is a story by itself. This city of 110,000 Inhabitants, close up by the frontier of 1870" is one of the prettiest towns in France and one of the most engaging---a provincial capital with ways and customs all its own. The line above Nancy was pushed back, by the Battle of Lorraine, to the very border, where it still rested when I saw Lorraine two years later. Beyond the town is a certain plateau, pitted with the old shell-holes of 1914 and the new ones of 1916. From this vantage-point, one day in June, I stood and saw The Line threading glen and forest almost below my feet. Over beyond, so close that I could make out individual houses in the villages, was that which the geographies called Germany after 1870. On the horizon to the left lay a dark dot---the cathedral of Metz, capital of Lost Lorraine.

Now Nancy is situated like Dunkirk on the other extremity of the eastern front ; it can be reached from across the German lines by the gigantic 380-millimetre guns. On New Year's day of 1916, the enemy opened with a gun of this kind, on Nancy. At long and irregular intervals, they have been doing it ever since. The people of Nancy understand that the Germans keep their big gun in a cave, concealed from prying airmen, and draw it out when they are ready to shoot. So in Nancy they have named it "Fafner," after the great dragon in Siegfried. For the explosion of its shells, they have borrowed a slang phrase from the sadly harassed people of Pont-à-Mousson; they call it "Zanzan."

That gun has a twenty-mile range. It fires mainly at night. Without aeroplane direction, such a fire is necessarily inaccurate. The gunner simply shoots at Nancy, as the amateur huntsman a shot at the moose---"all over." It seems to serve no military end, save perhaps terrorism.

When "zan-zan" strikes a house, even the largest and finest house, the structure simply melts to dust, to broken stones, and to fragments of walls. When it bursts on hard pavement. it ruins the buildings on both sides of the street. I am asked not to mention how many men, women and children of Nancy have been killed by this intermittent bombardment. As one citizen of the town put it:

"If the Germans find they have killed fewer than they expected, they may try more often if they find they have killed more, it may whet their appetite."

It is quite impossible for the alien outsider of Nancy to go to bed in his comfortable, modern hotel without remembering that before morning he and the whole surrounding scene may be eliminated. At twenty minutes past three a.m.---I timed it on the luminous dial of my wrist watch---of my last night in Nancy, I was wakened by the clatter of bells, by a sound of running feet on the pavement outside, and by an explosion. My heart clutched and stood still. But that explosion was followed, in rapid succession, by three more. I realized then that it must he an air raid ; for it takes ten minutes or so to load and fire a 380 m.m. gun. 1 was so relieved that I turned over and went to sleep again, illogically oblivious of the fact that an air-bomb is itself a good eliminator. Nancy as at Lunéville. the passing German aeroplanes always take a few shots.

Because it is a large city, and therefore inflammable, they often use incendiary bombs.

Certainly the people of Nancy, these canny, shrewd Lorrainaise who have been called the Scotchmen of France, live in terror of Fafner. But living in terror is a different thing from acting on the impulse of terror. Few people have left the city. The tram-cars run, the cinema shows are open, the shops---served usually by the women---offer all the necessities and most of the luxuries.

Yet it is impossible to keep the thought of Fafner entirely out of one's intelligence. I dined there one night amidst charming company in a gracious French household. It was rather a gala occasion ; with the present restrictions on travel, visitors from the world without are a little uncommon in these beleaguered districts. Now and then, amidst the gay and wise conversation, the thought would recur: Quite possibly in one blinding, bursting instant, the tasteful old house, the fine collections of Lorraine antiques, the ancestral portraits, the hosts, the guests, the aged family butler, the pretty daughters---all that made this picture of charming social intercourse---might vanish into atoms and primordial chaos.

As a matter of fact, there have been some narrow escapes from larger loss of life. By great good-fortune, the first shells of Fafner's bombardments have generally struck open places, giving the inhabitants warning to run for those vaulted cellars which are in these days the strongholds of civilian France. Once, on the first shell of a bombardment, M. Léon Mirman, the Préfet of the district, ordered all the schools and workshops to be cleared. As the shells fell, the police reported the results either in person or by telephone. So the news came that a certain girls' primary school was struck. M. Mirman glanced at the list of schools and factories before him, and his blood ran cold. Whoever made up the list had omitted that school !

He was frozen with horror as he jumped into his automobile. It was true; the school was only a mass of broken stones. The ruins still smoked; but he and his policemen rushed into the wreckage. From somewhere at the back, a woman's voice hailed them. She was standing at a cellar trap-door, which the bombardment had not covered. And inside the vaulted cellar were all the little girls, quite unhurt. The woman principal had moved them, at the sound of the first shell, to this place of refuge. So loud were the other explosions that when this one wrecked their school the children only said:

"That came pretty near!"

As most observers have remarked, Paris has few idle hands since the war. Not to be working at something for the Republic in her time of need figures as a minor disgrace. If this is true of the capital, it is doubly true of Nancy, moth-city to a stricken province, a gateway to the Great Line. The unhoused people of the devastated district have poured into this Provincial capital. Near the town, in an old barracks, the private charity of Nancy, with help from outside, is maintaining 3,500 refugees. There are, for example, the people of Nomeny, a town where the Germans behaved exceptionally badly at the beginning, and which is now so near the front that it has been nearly eliminated by the guns. There are the children of Pont-à-Mousson. That city is crumbling too. We were to have seen it, but on the morning fixed for our visit the staff officers would not let us go, the town was under such heavy bombardment. Nevertheless, its stout, home-loving burghers mostly refuse to leave. However, they have sent out their children to this refugee home. Volunteer woman teachers of Nancy are running schools for them, and for the other child-refugees in this camp. Such men among these guests of Nancy as are not too old for work can get employment in the fields. The younger women have gone to the munition works. The older are knitting or sewing for the army. There is a chapel; there is an amusement hail, with a "movie" show nearly every night. Heaven bless Thomas A. Edison for inventing the moving picture! He can never know how much he has done to relieve the strain of this war.

There is a story of infinite pathos and tragedy, and often, so curious is war, of infinite humour, in every refugee at this camp. Most picturesque of all is the tale of Charles Derlan, a straight, pleasant, sixteen-year-old boy, whom we found in the hospital helping his mother nurse the wounded. He wore a natty, soldier uniform, with the Cross of War on the left breast; the two notched chevrons above his left biceps showed that he had served more than eighteen months at the front, the corresponding single chevron above his right, that he had been wounded and returned to his command.

He lived at Pont-à-Mousson. In the first month of the war his father fell in action near that town. Thereupon young Derlan, only fourteen at the time, offered himself to the regiment in his father's place. They could not enlist him legally, but he was so persistent that at last they gave him a uniform and made him a messenger. He got his wound and his Cross of War for valour under fire ; he went back---this time, by another breach of the rules, to carry a gun. His second wound was in the abdomen ; the surgeons ruled that it made him useless for military purposes, and "reformed" him. But he is not taking that for a refusal. He believes that he can still act as a motor-cycle messenger, and he has applied for the job.

As an example of the picturesque war-charities proceeding at Nancy, I cite only this among many. One evening a committee of ladies showed me a collection of marvellous French needlework---table-cloths, napkins, handkerchiefs, infants' clothes and the like---going to Cleveland, Ohio, for sale. Every piece bore in the, corner that device of a turreted bridge which is the arms of Pont-à-Mousson.

The women there are making them in the cellars," said one of these ladies. "They have nothing else to do, poor things. On days when the bombardment isn't heavy, one of us goes tip by automobile to take in the linen and bring out the finished work. Look here,"---and she showed a set of half a dozen fine handkerchiefs ---" the woman who made these wrote us that she was sorry her consignment was late. She had half a dozen ready last week, but a shell struck her house and destroyed two of them---'which I had carelessly left upstairs,' she wrote---and she had to make two more!

Somewhere. in the confusion of British and American comment on the war, I have come across the remark that the physical destruction of Armageddon is after all infinitesimal compared with the whole wealth of Europe. This, I take it, is a fairly misleading statement of a situation which will be a problem for many years. The property loss in the San Francisco disaster was infinitesimal compared with the whole wealth of the United States. Yet the elimination of property values, the wealth drawn from normal uses for the rebuilding, was a contributing cause, if not the main cause, for the American panic of 1907. Success and failure, prosperity and poverty, proceed in this modern world by narrow margins.

Let me confine myself for the moment to this region behind the eastern French front. Such statistics as there are would go to prove that in population affected, in number of houses destroyed, it was a lesser disaster than that of San Francisco. I have a general impression---there are no complete statistics as yet to prove or disprove it---that the Lorraine disaster was perhaps even greater than the San Francisco disaster. The Great Fire wiped out a number of skyscrapers; there is no parallel for them in Northern France. On the other hand, the characteristic dwelling-house of the old American city before the fire was of flimsy redwood, while the characteristic dwelling-house of Northern France was of stout stone construction, built for all time. Nowhere in America do we erect so substantially.

There is another factor which I have never seen mentioned in print. The roads of France, the model roads of the world, were a great national asset. They made agricultural transportation easy, and France is pre-eminently the agricultural nation of Western Europe. During the past fifteen years they had brought great wealth of another kind. These highways, together with the excellent wayside inns, had created in France the motorist's paradise, to which all the wealthy of two continents came for their touring.

Now San Francisco lost a few miles of city paving. France, besides some city paving in such towns as Verdun and Pont-à-Mousson, has lost, in the Lorraine sector alone, hundreds and hundreds of miles of these great roads. Along the whole line, she has lost thousands of miles. For continuous army traffic simply murders roads. The army, it is true, keeps them in a kind of temporary repair for its own use. But before they can ever be brought back to their former state, they must be built again from the foundation up.

Another factor is the destruction of the irreplaceable. In the San Francisco disaster no irreplaceable property was lost except a few paintings. Everywhere, in the Armageddon disaster, have perished things like the old church at Clermont-en-Argonne, like the better-known Rheims Cathedral, which can never be restored to France. Irreplaceable art is a financial asset. Italy, viewing the subject in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, could better afford to lose most of her northern factories than two or three square miles of Florence.

Still further, San Francisco managed to resume business and production almost at once. In Lorraine, alter more than two years, all industry except agriculture is still paralyzed and must be so until the war ends.

This takes account only of the section behind the Verdun, Lorraine and Argonne lines. But the wreckage of calamity stretches from Belfort to the sea. There is the district about Soissons, as wantonly devastated as Lorraine. The line runs for 400 miles, through village after village; a belt say ten miles wide, in which few works of man will be standing when the truce comes.

As I write this, the British and French communiqués mention daily new towns reconquered by the time they are taken, there remains of them only ruin. There is Rheims (110,000 inhabitants), of which one-quarter to one-third is ruined, with the rest going fast. There are Verdun and Pont-à-Mousson. There is Ypres (25,000 inhabitants), virtually all gone there is the knot of Flemish towns, like Hasbrouck, about Ypres. There is Belgium, from whose hills, when the Germans came through, I sometimes beheld villages smoking as far as eye could reach.

In all this there are many San Francisco disasters. The work of the Quakers is only a beginning; and the physical restoration of France should be the concern of a world for whose liberties, along with her own, the Heroine of the Nations has fought so valiantly.

He was a sailor from the prairies of South Dakota which sounds paradoxical, but is the cold truth. That was not the only odd thing about this tall, Viking-looking person in the uniform of the Foreign Legion. He had, for example, the strangest accent I ever heard. For his father was a Swede. From him he got his straight, almost Greek line of the nose and brow, his stature and his long, fine limbs, which seemed athletic and able even as he stood balanced on his crutches. His mother was Scotch, and from her he got his sandy complexion. So his father's native speech sounded in his "j's," with which he had trouble when he grew excited, and all Scotland burred in his "r's." But he had run away to sea at the conventional age of eleven, serving under a succession of Yankee and English masters, so that he had both a Yankee twang and a Cockney squeeze in his speech. Twice wounded, he was awaiting the issue of that torn and broken leg to see whether he was going to be "reformed" or sent back to the line. "I enlisted for experience," he said, and by "Yee, I got it!"

He told of his two great battles, of brushes in the trenches, of his funny chum from Texas who always kept him heartened up with jokes; but time after time he came back to his one great adventure in life and death. and always he peered into my face as though looking for some justification, some approval, of a deed quite outside any moral standards which he had ever been taught---a deed which belonged to a region of new and special morals.

His regiment had attacked, gloriously and successfully. He had gone in without rifle, as a bomb-thrower. The Germans had been driven out; his company was "consolidating" the broken, shell-torn. flesh-strewn ground, which had been a series of trenches before the French opened that terrible, concentrated artillery fire of theirs.

"We came to a bomb-proof,'' he said ; "it was all wrecked. I heard somebody talking or groaning---making a little bit of a noise. We sneaked up and listened. They were groaning in German. We looked in. I said in English, 'For God's sake.' The fellow nearest me turned his head and said For God's sake, Kid, give me some water ' Just like that-plain United States. 'I ain't got no water for myself,' I said. 'Twas the truth. Charging is dry work. My canteen was empty, and my tongue was as dry as a bone. 'Where do you come from, to be talking United States? ' I said. 'From all over the States,' he said---'born, lived there most of my life ' He didn't say it straight off like I'm saying it. He was groaning and grunting all the time---and weak. 'Then if you got no water,' he says, 'stick a bayonet into me, Kid. I'm suffering horrible, and there ain't no chance for me. For God's sake I'd do the same for you."

"His legs---well, I couldn't fix my legs the way his was. All twisted like a corkscrew. But he kept talking about his back. I turned him over and looked. They---they hung out of his back like ropes. There were two others. One had his brains leaking---he was as good as dead already. The other was rattling in his throat. When the Deutschers go away, their brancardiers leave them as have no chance---for us. 'Twould be hours before our brancardiers would come along with dope to ease up their last minutes.

"Then he raved, and begged me.

"Well, I couldn't. I might 'a' shot him if I'd had a gun, but 1 couldn't stick him. I couldn't do anything to ease him. He was past first aid, and I hadn't any water.

"My mate was a Greek. I told him in French what was the matter.

"'There's some grenades back there,' he says.

"We went back and found the grenades---loaded our pockets. We sneaked up to the bomb-proof sudden, so he wouldn't know we were coming, and primed 'em and threw 'em all inside. After we'd got through, there couldn't be anything alive in there.

"I'd 'a' thanked him to do it for me if I'd been in that fix. Wouldn't you?"

And his eyes again searched my lace, for sympathy and justification.

THOSE who dare prophesy mid-course of such an event as Armageddon say that Verdun will be reckoned its turning-point. English writers have commented, time and again, upon the resemblance between the General European War and the American War of Secession. Here is another analogy. In the older war, the decisive battle was Gettysburg, a defensive action. The losing army was neither captured nor scattered. The South fought on for two years more, but with no more chance of victory. So, probably, will Verdun look to the future historian.

Only, Gettysburg was a skirmish compared to Verdun. The American battle lasted three days, the European five months. The Americans lost fewer men in the whole action than the French and Germans in the first rush. For numbers engaged on a narrow front, for intensity of artillery fire, for slaughter and for valour of all kinds, the world never saw its equal, until the British on the Somme took up their own burden of death and heroism. Within a fortnight of the first attack, hardly a fighting trench was left in the five miles between Douaumont Plateau and the city of Verdun. The front line became a series of interlocked shell-holes. The advanced communication trenches, by which reinforcements reach the front in comparative safety, were caved in or ruined; regiments moved from rest to action under a battle-hail of shells. The glimpses which artillery observation officers have given me, are almost too appalling for repetition. They have seen whole German battalions, caught by curtain-fire and machinegun fire which stopped either advance or retreat, "milling" in a circle like cattle, until all lay piled up, dead. They have seen German regiments charge into a wood which gave a little cover, and break out from both sides, facing bullets rather than what they beheld within. For five months the Verdun sector gave out a continuous roar, audible twenty miles away.

Against such terrible, concentrated fire, the French held until the British were ready at last, until the Germans could do no more. The Germans were ever attacking, the French waiting and defending. The German losses were, therefore, the heavier---how much so we may not know for years. Yet every soldier understands that to wait under a rain of death is harder than to charge into death---that the test of morale is not action, but passivity. After the first rush, when something went wrong, when the Germans, by getting the railroad under their fire, gave the French a bad week, the defending army yielded nothing essential. Never once was their morale shaken. They hung on by teeth and toe-nails, but still they hung on. In the later days of the action, I watched the troops going forward to position; and I talked to some of them. They went expecting to die, but resolved to fight until the end.

Now in this battle, as in the whole course of the war, the Germans have enjoyed most of the material advantage over France. They had more people by 60 per cent. ; they had infinitely more national wealth. They had been dreaming war, preparing for war, during a period of forty years. To them, the army was a thing of pride and great public interest ; whereas to France it was a burden. In the year before the struggle opened, three hundred books on war were published in Germany, and perhaps fifty in France. The German war-books enjoyed a large popular sale ; the French circulated only among military men. Germany had been building up a great industrial system; and always as she built she planned ways of turning her industrial machinery into war-machinery when Armageddon should begin.

She was prepared, in a material way, as nation was never prepared in the history of the world. I saw the German army of invasion, the new machine with the oil and fresh paint still on it, pass through Belgium on its way to take Paris. It seemed perfection. I could write pages on the completeness of every detail, and chapters on the co-ordination of every part. We who disbelieved in their cause carried away the uncomfortable thought that nothing could ever stop it. There came among us war correspondents who had seen the advanced French forces on the Belgian border. They pictured an army ill-prepared and ill-munitioned "Beside this, the French look like a gipsy train," said one of them.

Until recently the Germans have had over the French the advantage of strategic railroads, of shells, of arms. Even at Verdun, I believe that they owned more guns, were able to expend more ammunition, than the French. Forty years, during which the best brains of Germany thought war while the best of France thought art, served to perfect a system of co-ordinated parts which is the despair of imitators.

Yet the French army, beaten at the first rush by power of superior preparation and by the violation of the Belgian border, won at the Marne, with inferior forces, one of the few real victories in this war. The Germans retired to the positions laid out in case of defeat---another instance of their long preparation.. and the interminable period of trench warfare began. Since when, no one has been able to say whether the French army or the German is the better, man for man, gun for gun, franc for mark. Some neutral experts lean to one opinion, and some to the other---largely according to their hopes and feelings. But no one gives much margin to either side. Let us say for the sake of argument that the two armies, proportionate to their numbers, are about equal in efficiency and power.

Now, if the Germans have had all along the superiority in equipment, in resources, in preparation, and in coordination of parts, the French must have something in their favour---some element of superiority which brings them to a par. What is it? Individual efficiency?

Probably not. For while in the realm of intellectual ideas the French are the clearest thinkers in the world, the Germans have always seemed more at home with practical ideas. The French are the philosophers of humanity, the Germans of machinery. And war is not a matter of intellectual ideas but of practical ideas. Again; on the purely physical plane, the French may have more nervous force, but the Germans have the stronger bodies.

There remains only one factor and this must account for the French parity. The French and German systems of handling men---what soldiers call discipline---differ widely. While each nation is using a method suitable to its national character, the French has worked better. The heroine of the nations has been able to counteract superior industrial organization, an older and better worked-out system of strategic movement, and the higher mobility given by strategic railroads, because democratic discipline, applied to a people who love democracy, has worked better than an autocratic system applied to a people who love authority. To one nurtured in democracy, this is an encouraging, a thrilling fact.

We have heard a great deal, recently, about the democracy of the French army, and all the more because we Americans suspect, in this period of talk about preparedness, that our democracy has made a mistake in modelling its army discipline somewhat upon the German system instead of the French. What we have heard is mostly true. The French army is the most democratic the world ever saw, except perhaps its forebear of the Revolutionary Armies, which swept Europe off its feet, or ours which fought the Civil War. It is democratic to a degree which shocks, on first sight, the officers of most other nations. Let me, a citizen of the other Great Republic, examine their system to see how it works, and how France maintains it in face of the tendency toward snobbery which always goes with rank.

All the non-German world is in a state of intense admiration, just now, for France and her works. In that frame of mind, enthusiastic British and American writers have been calling them the most democratic people on earth, have been declaring that, as compared to them, even America and the British colonies know nothing at all about the idea upon which the republic was built. We applied formulas to the French before the war. Their detractors, building impressions upon two or three square miles of night-blooming Paris, and upon the over-frank modern French literature, called them 'immoral" ; and even their friends called them "excitable." Now---, no immoral people could have developed that vigour of soul which they have shown in this war; and for two years they have been as excitable as a field-rock. Yes, we tried to describe them by formulas, just as the European tries to describe America by the formula "materialistic." That will never do with any people. And there is danger that we shall go in the other direction and apply a new formula ---"absolutely democratic "---as far from the truth, and therefore as unfair, as were its predecessors.

I suspect that if we could weigh the qualities of nations as we weigh a chemical, we should find that the French and the Americans---or at least the Americans of old native stock---are about equally democratic, though in a different way. There are social strata in France, very set and definite. A man---or a woman---climbs from one stratum to another less frequently in French life than in American. There is the old haute noblesse, people living on the memory of a past nobility and the hope of a new monarchy, who keep up religiously that system of caste which the law does not recognize. There is a provincial aristocracy with manners, sanctions and opinions of its own. There is a gay, flashing haut monde of Paris. There is the great, productive and somewhat stuffy middle class---the bourgeoisie, There are the peasant proprietors and the simple peasants. Apart from all this, springing from all classes and yet a class by themselves, stand the artists. All the greater circles are broken up into innumerable little, close, subcircles.

Usually, as all the world knows, marriage in France, at least among the middle and upper classes, is arranged by the parents. What we call misalliances are therefore less common in France than in England, for example. In marriage, the Frenchman keeps to his class.

French family life is exclusive. A Frenchwoman of conservative turn will boast that her family is "a closed circle" ; that it has never been stained by the presence of unrelated outsiders, except for a very few lifelong friends. To invite a man to your house suddenly and informally---as Anglo-Saxons are always doing---would seem a barbarous proceeding to most Frenchmen. One lives, characteristically, in his own circle, giving himself otherwise only to a few friends, preferably old ones. The relatives in the first, second or third degree furnish sufficient intimate human companionship for many Frenchmen and perhaps for most Frenchwomen.

On the other hand, the men of France keep their snobbery or exclusiveness, or whatever one may call it, for strictly home consumption. When your Frenchman steps out into the great world of production or business or politics, he assumes quite a different attitude---and it is not a pose, either. The French Revolution, which left such a lasting impress on this brilliant, charming and strangely stiff-necked people, had for a cardinal principle "equality." It is necessary, the Frenchman feels, to assume equality if he have it not. The guide-books warn British visitors that "titles of deference such as 'Monsieur' must be employed to persons far down the social scale." In England the washerwoman is called simply by her last name---"Scruggins" or "Jones." In France she is always "Madame." Your butcher or baker, no matter how humble, is "Monsieur" to you, though you carry the blood of Hugh Capet.

On a certain tour of the front my guides were two French officers, one a graduate of Saint Cyr---the French West Point---and the other, before he donned horizon blue, a university professor. They found it necessary, at a certain town near the guns, to ask directions and information of an ignorant, slatternly and very poor woman who had crawled back to remake a home in the ruins. I was not much interested in the matter of their conversation; what struck me was the manner. Nothing in their words, their gestures or their tones indicated that they were anything but neighbours, come to ask a small favour. She might have been a woman of "their own sort." They were neither deferential nor patronizing. Neither, for that matter, was she. "If a Count talks to a ploughman in France," said a member of the old, high nobility, "the one of the pair most likely to be abrupt is the ploughman---and that simply because his training in manners is bad."

In the older towns of New England the butcher or the milkman often has on his wall at home a quartering from the Mayflower. The butcher and the milkman consider themselves as good as any man or woman alive, and expect treatment on that basis. If the "Summer people" accept them on that basis, well and good. But the outlander who assumes the "my good man" attitude never lasts long in the community. He finds that he cannot, somehow, seem to get meat or milk, and that all the desirable cottages are "spoken for next year." The same thing, I have heard, happens to superior strangers in the small towns of France. These strangers, however, are never French---they know better.

So it seems generally to go in France---exclusiveness within the home, pleasant and easy democracy without. In this principle lies the final answer to the democracy of the French army basically it is so because the French are that kind of people.

The French army, indeed, has always been a democratic organization---at least since the Revolution overthrew the old régime, and left its permanent impress upon France. The Revolutionary armies swept out to roll back the forces of Royalty with "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," on their banners. The officers were "Citizen" Jacques or Louis or Jean, like the privates. Napoleon, who understood how to strangle the Revolution while turning its fire and fervour to his own uses. did not destroy that spirit. He rather fostered it, treating his grenadiers with familiarity, encouraging his officers to do the same, promoting from the rank and file wherever he found merit. He made marshals of France out of shoemakers and tailors. By the time that Waterloo ended twenty years of war under Napoleon, this idea of army discipline was ingrained. The successive monarchies and even the Empire of Napoleon III, with its artificial glitter and parvenu titles, did not destroy the spirit. The army entered into the period of the Third Republic and of universal conscription a working democracy.

Of course, conscription, which takes men of every class and makes them plain privates, may be, if left alone, a great leveller. The Germans have not left it alone; they have consciously made and kept their army aristocratic not because of conscription, but in spite of it.

Now France has had within her always the seeds of a military caste. War is the profession of an aristocracy. As elsewhere, the old nobility feels it obligatory to have at least one officer in the family. Moreover, there are genuine military families, where the profession is passed along from father to son. Generals Pau and Castelnau, who have borne so much of the burden in this war, spring from such stock. Men in power always want more and more power. Doubtless there would be now in France, as in Germany, an effective hereditary military ring, but for the occasional interference of the Government and the steady interference of a force more powerful than government---custom and national feeling. And those precautions against a military caste begin with the French system of selecting officers.

There are two great military academies in France---St. Cyr and the Polytechnique. St. Cyr educates the officers of cavalry, infantry and the staff; Polytechnique the officers of the artillery and engineer corps. The French believe in specialization when I tell their officers that at West Point we give the same education to artillery officers as to cavalry and infantry officers, they shake their heads. Both these institutions are open to all applicants. However, there is not enough room for all who apply; and entrance is settled by competitive examination. Even at St. Cyr these competitive entrance examinations are very searching. Besides mathematics and several branches of liberal learning, the prospective St. Cyrian must be instructed in the manly arts of war, such as riding, shooting, and fencing. For an examination admitting five hundred students three thousand candidates frequently present themselves. The appointments go to those who pass highest on all qualifications. Generally, these boys have been trained all their lives with a view to entering Saint Cyr. Special preparatory schools exist for this purpose.

The Ecole Polytechnique requires a more thorough preparation and a higher individual standard. It is as keen and advanced a school of high engineering as exists in the world; from it France gets her best civilian engineers, since a graduate of the Polytechnique may resign and return to civil life, subject to call in case of war, after five years' service in the army. So keen is the struggle for appointment to the Polytechnique that he who passes the entrance examinations must be a young mathematical marvel.

"The successful candidate for the Polytechnique," says a Franco-American engineer whom I know, "has more mathematics than the average honour-graduate in mathematics of an Anglo-Saxon university." Here is a proof that the prize scholar of the schools is not as a rule a failure in life for Joffre and several other men who have risen by merit to leadership in the French army were honour-men at the Polytechnique.

To educate a boy at Saint Cyr or the Ecole Polytechnique, therefore, takes money, just as it does to educate him at an American or British university. And this, in itself, would tend to aristocratic feeling in the army. Our American system, whereby every West Pointer is educated at Government expense, seems more democratic. However, there are several counter-currents. Saint Cyr, the Ecole Polytechnique and their preparatory schools, have a very liberal system of scholarships, whereby poor boys of talent and ambition may get their education free. Joffre was educated mainly by scholarships. His father was a cooper of the Pyrenees, and his mother helped out the family income by dressing vines.

Further, until recently every officer had to serve a year in the ranks. Sometimes he took his examination for Saint Cyr or the Polytechnique just before coming up for his military service, and sometimes after completing that service. About five years ago that system was abolished, because the French felt that the officer, in the growing specialization of his profession, could not afford to lose a year from his studies. I once questioned a former professor of St. Cyr, whom I found serving in an entrenched camp behind the lines, upon this point. "Aren't you afraid that this will make against democracy?" I asked.

"It was much discussed among us at the time," he said, "but we concluded that the officers didn't really need it---that the democratic spirit was ingrained in the French. You know, we teach it constantly at St. Cyr. And an additional year in technical training is very useful."

They have, like most nations, a service school---an academy, wherein "rankers" who have shown exceptional ability and who wish to make arms their profession are educated at state expense as officers.

All this applies to the regular army officers. In peacetime this corps takes each year's class as it comes to the colours, trains it, leads it during its period of military service, and then takes up a new class. In event of war, this active young army with these professional officers forms the first line of defence.

Aside from this body, and really more important, are the reservists and territorials, all of whom have been called out in the course of this war. The first lines of France and Germany were badly cut up at the beginning. The heaviest work is being done now by these two classes of older men. After a conscript has served his two-or three-years with the colours, he becomes a reservist. For the first three years he is in the" active reserve." At the age of thirty-five he passes on to the territorials. It was hardly supposed, anywhere, that the territorials would be called upon to fight in the trenches. In the advanced plans of campaign, they were assigned to guard the lines, garrison the towns and dig reserve trenches. But the war has gone to such unexpected lengths that the territorials are facing fire with the boys. The first line, including the regulars and the active reserve, comprises men from twenty-one to twenty-six years of age; the reserve, men from twenty-seven to thirty-five; the territorials, men from thirty-five to forty-seven. These figures show how important numerically the two bodies of older men have become in comparison to the regular first-lite army.

Now St. Cyr and the Polytechnique do not furnish much more than enough officers for this first-line army. Therefore the officers who will take out the reservists and territorials in case of war are trained from the ranks during their period of military service. The regular officers select privates who have the ambition and ability to make reserve officers. They are hurried along to the grade of sergeant, and finish the last part of their military service in a special school for reserve officers. Upon leaving the army they are expected to do a certain amount of "home study" ; and they must henceforth serve at manoeuvres for at least twenty-eight days every two years. When the mobilization comes, they take command of the men, their neighbours, with whom in youth they were called to the colours as private soldiers.

As the system works out practically, the position of reserve officer falls usually to the "intellectuals" of the district. These men have a general education, which counts here as everywhere. Further, the position of reserve officer brings burdens which not every peasant or shopkeeper is willing to assume, whereas the young professional man assumes them willingly as part of his standing and advancement. The rising young lawyer of a provincial town, the manager of the local factory, the son of the largest landed proprietor, is likely to be a reserve or territorial officer. Schoolmasters and university professors are largely represented in this body. These men have standing and leadership in their own towns. That leadership---democratic always---helps when the company or regiment meets the strain of battle. This is not a rule, only a tendency. A great many men of humble occupation were reserve officers before the war.

So it was when France entered Armageddon. There followed the unexpectedly heavy losses of this war of slaughter. Further, some of the reserve officers proved incompetent to command under battle conditions. New officers had continually to be supplied. And France supplied them from the ranks, choosing on no standard except military talent, courage and leadership. Probably the educated men have fared best in this process of selection, but it would be hard to say absolutely. The instances of humble men raised to command are so many that I would become wearisome if I quoted all I know. Here, however, are a few:

The little hotel at which I stayed in Paris when the lines were being locked on the Aisne had a pretty young chambermaid in a state of constant anxiety about her husband. They had married only six months before; he was the "boots" of the hotel. I asked about her the other day. She had left, they said. Her husband was a lieutenant now, and she was living on his pay. An American corporal in the aviation corps keeps his wife and children in Paris. Last week their nursemaid left. "Why?" asked her mistress. "My husband has become a lieutenant," she replied. "Besides, my brother-in-law is a major, and I've been thinking for some time that I shouldn't be working for a corporal's wife." A wounded officer remarked to me: "One officer in our company was a priest before the war, one was a St. Cyr graduate, the son of a shopkeeper, one was a pork-butcher, and I---I am a Count." The manager and owner of a large department store in a provincial city finds himself grubbing in the trenches under command of his youngest shop-walker. A captain, in private life a land-owner and a Count, escorted a party of correspondents to the line. He excused himself one day to have a talk with a major at a certain headquarters. "He is such a good soldier," said the Count, "that he always gives me ideas." It came out later that the major, before the war, was the jeweller who used to repair the Count's watches. My escorting officer on a recent journey to the French front was a university professor ; he entered this war a sergeant. Later, I was treated with equal courtesy and efficiency by an officer who was a peasant farmer. I know, or know of, weavers, hotel-porters, waiters and barbers who are wearing the galons of officers, along with the service ribbons of decorations for valour.

In cases of exceptional merit or exceptional emergency men have been promoted at the front and have taken office at once. This, however, seldom happens. The company or staff officers pick the man who seems worthy of promotion. He has already learned at the front, of course, things which officers in peace-time never learn from their theoretical training. But he needs theory, too. A few months of intensive education, during which the incompetents are weeded out, and the new officers take up the sword of command.

So much for the present situation: but now let me turn back to the long period of preparation in peacetime.

On the face of it, St. Cyr and the Polytechnique should turn out a body of officers less democratic than our own, since West. Point is a free school while these require tuition. Practically the system does not work out that way. While the sons of titled France tend toward St. Cyr, the members of the great middle class seem fascinated with the idea of having an officer in the family. Of late years, for example, policemen have more and more educated their sons as officers. Further, there is the scholarship system. A St. Cyrian tells me that if it were possible to average the social standing of St. Cyr officers, it would be found to lie somewhere in the lower middle class. "We are a bourgeois body," he says.

The sons of the aristocracy of wealth and the aristocracy of birth tend to elect certain crack cavalry regiments which have always been a little apart from the main current of army life. These regiments live expensively and rather gaily. No officer elects them unless he can follow the pace. For the rest, French barrack life is dull and monotonous. Perhaps most of the officers marry women with little dowries but so do most French lawyers, doctors, engineers, business-men and what not. The "mercenary marriage" is still an all but universal custom in middle-class France---an outsider is tempted to say that it is the curse of France. However, this supplement to the forty dollars a month which a second lieutenant gets in peace-time and to the hundred and twenty dollars a month of a captain, is on the average not large. Their incomes usually permit comfortable and simple living, and no more. No great army has less etiquette of a formal kind and less expensive or necessary entertaining than the French.

During times of peace, German barrack life is traditionally gay. No regular officer lives on his pay. It cannot be done. They must have money, or marry a good deal of money, in order to "keep up." Money begets the habit of idleness, The entertaining of German regiments takes time, in the corresponding time the French officer is working with his profession. They are the closest students of things military in all Europe. " When an officer leaves St. Cyr, his education has only begun," says an officer of the General Staff.

A successful physician doesn't stop with his graduation. He subscribes for the medical journals he attends clinics. He is a student to the end of his days. So are our officers."

Yet perhaps I have said nothing so far which gives to the reader a complete reason why the French army is so essentially democratic. I must come back to the reason I advanced in the beginning it is so because the French are that kind of people. As matter of fact, both the force of public opinion and the law of the land have been necessary at times to keep it democratic. There was one period during the troubled days of the Clemenceau Ministry when an army clique, desirous of a kind of army suzerainty over France, became powerful. The Ministry solved this by a device which might not have been effective with us, but which worked wonders with the French. They ruled that at all public functions the civil authorities must have precedence over the military. I saw the funeral of General Gallieni, Minister of War, the Military Governor of Paris who sent out the famous taxicab army to the Marne. Military hero though he was, the representatives of the Chamber of Deputies and of the Municipality marched at the head of the procession. Again, there was a time when the army wished to rule that the colonels of regiments must give their approval before a subordinate could be married. This, reduced to final terms, meant the beginning of an army aristocracy. It is the system which prevails in the German army, for example. The colonel sanctions only marriages with "women of one's own class," or at least with women of wealth who can help the officer keep up his position. In either case it comes to the same thing, because every aristocracy is in the beginning an aristocracy of wealth. The Ministry and the Deputies killed that order dead. Now, an officer on passing the building of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris must salute, just by way of honouring the power from which he derives his authority---the elected representatives of the people.

However, custom has, as usual, been the stronger force of the two. The French corps of officers could not have changed, even if it wished to do so, the attitude of the Frenchman toward the army, of the private soldier toward his superior. Young officers of aristocratic tendencies watched the German army at manoeuvres. They saw the absolute, unquestioning obedience of the German private, the soldierly "click" with which everything was done, the machine-like quality of the whole organization. Among themselves in barracks they might whisper their wish that the French army could be like that, voice their suspicion that the German system would prove better in action than theirs. They could not turn these opinions into working formulas. Such a system would not go down in France, they knew perfectly well, because of the French character and tradition. They must work with the national spirit as they found it. And their more understanding superiors never wanted any other system. They understood its advantages, and were turning them to use.

To begin with, the French staff, realizing the democratic attitude of the private, realizing also that they had smaller resources of men and material than Germany, tried to omit all unnecessary pomp and parade, and to use the time thus saved for more intensive training in the technique of fighting. Goose-steps, pretty evolutions, drills wherein the whole company moves as one man---these belong to an aristocratic society. The ideal of absolute monarchy is primitive; primitive ideals need a visible show of pomp and power. The ideal of a democracy is intellectual. It needs no such trappings. They produced a rather ragged-appearing army, whose real power and efficiency did not show. Two years before the war. I saw several regiments of French troops line themselves up along the Champs Elysées to welcome Queen Wilhelmina to Paris. I remarked at the time to a Franco-American friend, with whom I stood on relations of friendly quarrelsomeness, that their drill would be a disgrace to a school. "You are complimenting the French army," he said. A fortnight later, my civilian ignorance was enlightened on what he meant. In a city of the Puy-de-Dôme region, I watched the young recruits in their first week or so of training. The non-commissioned officers were not troubling about drill. They were teaching the men just enough to get them to their destination in orderly fashion, and no more. From the first, the main attention was devoted to entrenching, to skirmishing tactics, to marksmanship, to bayonet work, and the like.

Beyond that, the staff knew the national character well enough to understand that your Frenchman will not work in the dark. He wants to see what he is doing; he wants a little play for his individuality. In training, in manoeuvres and now in war, the French soldier demands to be told why he is making this attack, defending that position. He is a citizen of France, as good in his public character as any other man he feels he has a right to know. His officers grant him that right ; in addition, they develop his individuality and leave as much as they can, consistently with good team-work, to his own initiative---the antithesis of the absolute, blind obedience inculcated by the Prussian drill-master. The hope and possibility of promotion they dangle always before his eyes. Not only are the non-commissioned officers taught how to take command in case the officers are killed, but the chiefs of squads, and finally the "chief" of a squad of two men! Those young fellows who have been promoted from the ranks since the beginning of the war are not entirely new to the art of command. They learned something of it in their early military training.

The democratic theory of army discipline is a part of the teaching at St. Cyr. The young officers, far from being instructed that they are the upper crust of the earth, are taught that they are only the comrades of their men, chosen for command simply because they know more. They must rule, the instructors teach, less by fear than by friendliness. On the intractable man, who occasionally crops out in any organization, they must come down hard and French military law provides the apparatus for doing this. But such procedure must be the exception, not the rule. The officer must be a sort of father to the private---a relation expressed by the term mes enfants (my children) in which he most commonly addresses them. By no other system does it seem possible to get results out of Frenchmen. And by it the staff has got, in this war, the best results possible.

It remains to be said that there are all kinds of men in command of the French army, as there are all kinds of men everywhere I speak of the rule and not the exception. Veteran officers comment with amusement on the conduct of a few young sub-lieutenants, lately promoted from the ranks, who have become beggars on horseback, tending toward superiority and overstrictness. It may be noted also that such mistakes of the promotion system do not last long at the front.

Both the army and the populace resent this superior attitude. In the anxious days of Verdun, a bearded poilu of a sergeant appeared on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. He was wearing a stained uniform and a dented helmet, and he carried a ragged kit. All Paris knows this phenomenon, and smiles upon it indulgently---he was "home on leave," Now, he was new to the capital, apparently, and as he gaped at the cafés, the buildings, and the pretty girls smiling upon him, he failed to notice a lieutenant of the transport service in a spick-and-span new uniform. The officer accosted him

"Here!" he said, "why don't you salute? Go back six paces, advance, and salute as you pass!"

The sergeant obeyed to the dot but as his hand came down from his cap, he said: "In the trenches, Monsieur, we shake hands with our officers."

This happened before the Café de la Paix, that geographical centre of the universe, from which the Parisian watches the world go by. The crowd had noticed the episode, and when the sergeant said this, they rose up with some of the old Parisian mob-spirit and shoved the dandy lieutenant into the gutter. He was new to his galons that was the matter with him. Now I can imagine a crowd behaving so in the United States. I cannot imagine it in Germany. It would be characteristic only in France.

They say that in the trenches the officers usually begin the day by shaking hands all round and asking the men how they passed the night. Through little things do we know the character of a people or of an army and I record these impressions received during one trip to the front, wherein we travelled much of the way within sound of the Verdun guns.

At a point where all civilian clothes except peasant garb are conspicuous, we passed in our automobile a company of cavalry which had just saddled and prepared for the day's work. They saluted correctly. I chanced to look back. Some one, probably the captain in the centre of the group, had made a joke at our expense. The troopers about him were laughing and joking in their turn; it was all simple and natural and human. We dined that night in an important advanced base on the road of the Verdun transport. At the next table sat two lieutenants and two privates, having a very good time. The talk shuttled back and forth between personal gossip and warm discussion of military affairs. These men, it came out, were going home on leave; they had come out of the Verdun trenches only that morning. We had occasion, next day, to visit an artillery position. It was necessary to pick our route carefully, since we might show ourselves to the German artillery observers and receive the compliment of a shell or so. Two private soldiers, going our way, offered to guide us. We were in charge of an officer stationed near this position. Salutes exchanged, the officer and the two soldiers fell into easy conversation, so full of army slang that I could no more than catch its drift. On parting they all saluted formally again; then they shook hands and the officer opened his cigarette case, offering it as to a friend in his club. One of these privates appeared to be a rather illiterate though intelligent peasant. The other was a man of education. On parting, the officer gave us his card. He is a baron. That afternoon, in a town scarred and pitted from a recent air raid, our party took refuge from a violent rain-storm in a doorway. Presently, a private came dodging in. He saluted, correctly, upon seeing our lieutenant. The salute finished, they fell into easy conversation about things in general---just two Frenchmen together, on a basis of mutual esteem and mutual interest in the job.

War intensifies all emotions, even the softer ones; and the system has worked out, in practical effect, to a strong affection between sword and bayonet, the poilu and his commander. I have seen officers home on leave eaten up with emotion no more noble than pure jealousy. Each was afraid lest that fellow whom he had left in charge would get away the affection of his poilus. As for the soldiers in the characteristic French regiment, they have usually a fierce and affectionate loyalty as great in degree as the blind loyalty of your ideal feudal retainer, but quite different in kind. It proceeds from a faith in the squareness of the French system as they see it at work. The officer, they think, has been chosen officer because he is abler than they---because he knows more, has greater power of leadership. Sometimes their solicitude for the health and safety of their leaders is both amusing and touching. A convalescent captain tells me that one night. during the early, open fighting, he grew suspicious concerning a certain point at his front. He determined to inspect it for himself. He was on his way, when he heard a rustling behind him. He turned, on the alert, to behold six or seven of his own poilus crawling after him.

"Why are you out here, mes enfants?" he whispered. "Go back!"

"No," replied the one who first got tongue, "you must not go out there alone---we have come to look after you."

Said another officer:

"I picture my men as always hanging to my coattails. Whenever I take a peep over the trench, whenever I do anything dangerous, they say: 'But, my captain, if you should get killed, which of us would know enough to lead?'"

I know a lieutenant of a Breton regiment, now "reformed" from army service. His face, as you see it first, seems merely a little peculiar; there is an indentation somewhat too deep under the lower lip, and there are one or two small scars, now fading away. It is hard to believe, however, that he has no lower set of teeth at all. "I'm not the man I was," he remarked with his French blague. "You see, when the surgeons began by moving my chin from under my left ear to its proper position, they asked the family for a photograph, to see how I should look. The family made a mistake and sent my brother's photograph. He favours mother's side of the family, and I used to favour father's

He was hit in a hot attack during the German retreat to the Aisne---shot four times through the head. In those days of horrors unrecordable, the medical corps worked short-handed. Often, they had to leave behind the men who seemed to have no chance, that they might get out the others. They looked over this lieutenant. He remembers---for he kept consciousness, though he could neither move nor speak---that they said "No chance" and went away. However, a stray litterbearer informed his Bretons that the lieutenant was out there, "a hopeless case, and that they had been ordered to leave him. Under rifle and machine-gun fire, a squad of the Bretons made a rush and got him. Being simple-minded men, these Breton peasants were afraid that they had disobeyed orders; and so they hid him under a pile of blankets. Just then came the command to march---the general was shifting that brigade. The Breton company found a wheelbarrow, dumped the lieutenant into it, covered him with trappings, and told the officers some lie to account for this strange bit of transport material. All night, they took turns at trundling the wheelbarrow at the foot of the column. Next morning, they attacked. Before going into action, they took him out and propped him against a tree, so that he might have air. The attack over, they loaded him into an empty compartment of a camion. Just then a high regimental officer came along, looking for baggage space, and insisted upon inspecting that wagon. They tried by tact to prevent him. Their guilty looks made him suspicious, and he tore off the covers. "You see," stammered the Bretons, "it is our lieutenant. We---we didn't want to leave him behind." He went straight to the hospital, of course.

On the other hand, the better kind of French officer holds toward his privates and non-coms, the attitude of the dying Sir Philip Sidney---" thy need is greater than mine!" A young Irishwoman of Paris used, during the early, confused period, to feed the wounded as the hospital trains rolled through Paris. Often, these men had not eaten for a day. "The officers," she said, "no matter how badly wounded, used to say, 'my men first.' The trains only made a short stop, so that generally they got nothing at all."

An American ambulancier remembers that on his first day under the guns of Flanders, he started to carry out a squad of wounded. His instructions were to move the more heavily injured first. He looked over the blessés, and determined that a captain with a pair of crushed legs needed the most immediate attention. The American and his mate picked him up. He began to pour out a flood of French. The Americans, understanding the language not at all, thought he was merely delirious, and started to load him into the ambulance. Suddenly the officer drew his sword, thrust its point against the wall of the ambulance, and pushing with all his strength, kept himself from being lifted. Then a Frenchman ran up and explained. He refused, positively, to be taken to hospital before his men. He would run his sword through his own body first, he said! I heard that story early in the war, and it struck me then as remarkable ; but instances of the kind have become commonplaces to me now, so many do I know.

By contrast, another American ambulance-man remembers a case where he had to transport a lot of German prisoners. He loaded aboard a private, badly wounded.. The next case in line was a Prussian officer. He rose up on his stretcher and said in English

"I will not go in therewith privates. I am an officer and a baron."

"I told him," adds the American, "that I was a first-class private and an American citizen, and just for that he'd go on the top shelf.

In fact, testimony from those lively young American ambulanciers, the members of the American Ambulance Sections, may be pertinent.

"It's this way," said one of them. "The French officer just looks you in the eye and talks to you man to man. Once, I remember, we were taking the wounded out of the Champagne. We'd been working for seventy-two hours with only snatches of sleep. We were getting to the point where, when we'd try to park the machines, we'd run into each other. Just then a French officer came along. ' Messieurs,' he said, ' I almost feel I have no right to ask any more of you, you have worked so long and so bravely. But what can 1 do? Our wounded will die if they don't get to the hospitals.' Well, we'd have gone to hell for him, and we told him so. We braced up and worked twenty-four hours more!

The more I see of the French army, indeed, the more I am reminded of the old cattle days in the Far West. The life of the cowboy involved danger and hardship, bravely borne. There had to be in a cow-camp, as in any other working association of men, a system of discipline. The officer was the foreman. He held his job, usually, because he had technique, courage, and leadership. If he failed in those qualities, he did not last long. The cowboys obeyed him because they recognized his abilities. He put on no airs over his men. He was leader among them, but also one of them. Your ideal ranch-foreman was nearly equivalent to the ideal officer under the French system.

Or again, it resembles in its social common sense one of our great and well-directed business concerns. The personnel of such a business comprises many men of many kinds. The heads of departments are picked because they know the job best---they have gone forward through ability. If these heads of departments do not associate a great deal with subordinates out of office hours, it is only because they have more in common with other heads of departments. Nothing in the nature or custom of the business prevents them from inviting a subordinate to dinner now and then. Some of them do this very thing by policy---just like the wounded brigadier general, who said the other day in Paris:

"I never dine at the front without having one of my poilus with me at table!"

I drew this comparison once in presence of an eminent Frenchman. He answered a little impatiently:

"Ah, but war isn't a business! It is something nobler. We are dealing with life and death and one's country!"

Which is true the nobility raised up for a time in the individual being the factor which makes the lie of war a half-truth. Unlike a commercial organization, an army must prepare men not only to work intelligently but to die willingly. The force producing this final effect in the French army is the spirit of cordial affection between officers and men, which is linked, somehow, to their common, burning love of country.

To sum up the whole matter: it is no accident that the terminology of etiquette is nearly all French. They, more than any other people, understand the art of personal contacts. They know, best of all races, how human beings should behave toward each other. They have made of this understanding a military force.

All this gives the reason why the French army can meet the better-prepared, better-backed German army on equal terms. In willingness to die, a great end of army discipline, the autocratic German and the democratic Frenchman stand about on a par. In other ways, the advantage is all with the French. A conscript army embraces all kinds of men. Not every intelligent private among them can be made an officer. Young fellows who, if their lives be spared, will create the artistic, scientific and political future of the next generation, are serving in the French, German and British ranks. In the German army this exceptional private can use his brains so far, and only so far. The Frenchman of this class, allowed greater play for his intelligence, can use them very far, if he wishes. If any private in the French army has a useful suggestion, almost any officer in the French army is willing to listen. This is exactly the practice of some great industrial companies, like the Northcliffe newspapers, for example, where prizes are offered for the best weekly suggestion. A German private who would step up before action, salute, and say: "Pardon me, Captain, but hadn't you better look out for this point?" would doubtless be knocked down on the spot. But such a suggestion has often saved French companies, and, if a story I have heard be true, has at least once prevented a brigade from making an unsound movement. Indeed, the German private is in no position to conceive suggestions. He knows only dimly what his company, his regiment or his brigade is doing. The French soldier usually knows exactly. The full strategy of an impending movement is passed down the ranks until the plain poilu understands all that he is capable of understanding. So, in the unexpected emergency, he knows how to act, as the German often does not. The French army may have on the average no more intelligence than the German, but by its system it releases more of that intelligence for use.

Many of the French distrust democracy; the question is by no means wholly settled in the public mind. "The rottenest absolute monarchy that ever existed is better than the best Republic," I have heard a reactionary say. And before the war certain more moderate Royalists, while agreeing that democracy worked best in time of peace, said that it could not exist for long, because autocracy would always beat it in time of war. The French people have refuted that theory. Democracy, handled intelligently by an intelligent people, has proved the better way. This is not least among their triumphs.

The General of the British Royal Army Medical Corps admitted that he had one weakness, which in his lighter moments he described as the curse of his race. He had to have his tea at four o'clock. He could live without breakfast, luncheon and dinner, he said; he could dine on roast beef, or truffles, or tinned mutton, or hardtack; but tea he must have, and at four. He had knocked off now from a sixteen-hour stretch of the most anxious and exacting work for a cup of that private stock Ceylon which his servant keeps for him like a treasure. Tea-time was the hour to visit the General He was a pleasant, elderly gentleman, doing his job of repairing the wrecks of war with all the greater zeal because he abhorred warfare. By preference he talked in these sessions, either Indian civil government, of which he knew a great deal, or anthropology, which was his mild and gentle hobby. Only occasionally did he touch upon the war. As now ; for I had brought up a question agitating the British authorities in this harbour base.

The hospital trains discharged at the Gare Centrale. From that point the wounded were carried by automobile ambulance. It was a half-mile or so to the nearest hospital and all the way the ambulances must run across old-fashioned cobble-stones. To jolt across those cobbles was hard enough on well people. It was torture sometimes to the wounded. Whereupon the British offered to repave the streets with cement or asphalt.

The town authorities, touched in their pride, responded that they would repave as soon as they could afford it. In the meantime, they hinted, they would take no charity, even from allies.

"I like them for it," said the General. " The French are gentlemen. I didn't know it before the war. I'd lived mostly in India, and I'd never seen much of them close at hand. I'd thought they were unstable and excitable, and all that---you know. When we came up from Boulogne to the border in the beginning, the French cheered us and fed us and gave us drinks all the way. The girls came out and pinned flowers on us. We looked like the forest in Macbeth. They were most polite, too. They said we'd come to rescue France. We, with our two little army corps! Then came the retreat from Mons . . ."

The General paused here. He never said much at any time about the retreat from Mons, perhaps because he would have had to tell about his own not inglorious part in it, and that would have been "swanking," which is the eighth cardinal sin to a Briton. Ask any soldier who was in it, and he will answer, as by pattern: "It was hell-just hell! " With an enemy advancing thirty kilometres a day, the problem of the Medical Corps was not only to attend the wounded, it was to rescue them and to keep them from the enemy. The surgeons took daring chances. The General lost two assistants on the way back, one killed, one captured. He himself just missed both death and capture while he stayed behind to get out the last man at St. Quentin and Le Cateau. The General left all that to my memory and my imagination as he sweetened another cup of tea.

"We weren't in the confidence of the staff," he pursued, "and we thought we were badly whipped. So did the French. And all the time I had only one idea, beside work: What were the French going to think of us now? We had come up to help France, and we were beaten from the first. Not much leisure then to do any real thinking, you understand. It just buzzed in the back of my head, as a foolish little thing will when you're in action.

"Well, for a day or so I didn't find much time to talk to the French. But the night of Le Cateau, when I hadn't slept for twenty hours, I thought I'd take a breathing-space for a few winks. My servant found me a billet in a house on the edge of a town. He guided my machine in the darkness. We drove up to the gate. The house was all lighted up. I knocked, and madame came to the door. And honestly I didn't want to face her. It's curious how those little ideas take hold when a man is in an abnormal state.

"She was crying And when she saw my uniform she put out both her hands and said:

"'Oh, my poor friends, are you beaten? What can I do?' She had expected our coming, and she had set out a supper for us. There were even flowers on the table!

"That's how it went-all the way back to Paris---no word of reproach, ever. I didn't meet a man, woman or child who wasn't willing to do everything. One's own people couldn't have been half so kind. That's the test of people, isn't it---standing by!"

The General pulled himself up at this point. He had been showing emotion, which is shameful for a Briton.

"Another cup!" he said. "Really, you Americans should learn to take tea. It's much better for one than your cocktails---isn't that what you call them?"