o, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect;
as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New
York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in
France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her
roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out
of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding
the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of
transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village,
at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries
stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you
whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a
reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days
without official sanction.

The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German
counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I
made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in
the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an elan, a
martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a
door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that
we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps
the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in
summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were
full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street
ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated
attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine
starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to
the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You
have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you
cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have
only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are
clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of
Ste. Genevieve. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry
of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a
dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.
Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of
flus