he lost ones found. But Paris
knows very well that there are difficulties ahead, and that the French
love of symmetry and logic will have to make substantial concessions
here and there to the local situation. There are a number of
institutions, for instance, which have grown up and covered the
country since 1871, which cannot be easily fitted to the ordinary
_cadre_ of French departmental government. The department would be too
small a unit. The German insurance system, again, is far better and
more comprehensive than the French, and will have, in one way or
another, to be taken over.

But my own strong impression is that goodwill, and the Liberal _fond_,
resting on the ideas of 1789, which, in spite of their Catholicism,
has always existed in these eastern provinces (Metz, however, has been
much more thoroughly Germanised than Strasbourg since the annexation),
will see France through. And meanwhile the recovery of these rich and
beautiful countries may well comfort her in some degree for her
desolate fields and ruined towns of the North and Centre. The capital
value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and
the Germans leave behind them considerable additions to the wealth of
the province in the shape of new railway-lines and canals, fine
stations, and public buildings, not to speak of the thousands of
fruit-trees with which, in German fashion, they have lined the
roads--a small, unintentional reparation for the murdered fruit-trees
of the North.

* * * * *

A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General
Gouraud's notes and maps, up into the heart of the "front de
Champagne." You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Chalons,
with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and
where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations. And
presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin
to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before
the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost
rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness.
Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a
tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes. Close by are all the
places famous through years of fighting--Souain, Navarin Farm, Tahure,
the Butte de Tahure, and, to the north-west, Somme-Py, Ste. Marie-Py,
and so on to Moronvilliers and Cra