st above the ground. Thousands of
men faced each other less than four miles from where I stood, but all
that there was to be detected were the shell bursts; otherwise one saw
a pleasant country, rolling hills, mostly without woods, bare in the
spring, which had not yet come to turn them green. In the foreground
ran that arbitrary line Bismarck had drawn between Frenchmen forty-six
years before--the frontier--but of natural separation there was none.
He had cut off a part of France, that was all, and one looked upon
what had been and was still a bleeding wound.

I asked the French commandant about the various descriptions made by
those who have written about the war. They have described the German
attack as mounting the slope of the Grand Mont, where we stood. He
took me to the edge and pointed down. It was a cliff almost as steep
as the Palisades. "C'est une blague," he smiled. "Just a story." The
Germans had not charged here, but in the forest below, where the Nancy
road passed through and enters the valley of the Amezeule. They had
not tried to carry but to turn the Grand Mont. More than 200,000 men
had fought for days in the valley below. I asked him about the legend
of the Kaiser, sitting on a hill, waiting in white uniform with his
famous escort, waiting until the road was clear for his triumphal
entrance into the capital of Lorraine. He laughed. I might choose my
hill; if the Emperor had done this thing the hill was "over there,"
but had he? They are hard on legends at the front, and the tales that
delight Paris die easily on the frontiers of war.

But since I had asked so much about the fighting my commandant
promised to take me in the afternoon to the point where the struggle
had been fiercest, still farther to the south, where all the hills
break down and there is a natural gateway from Germany into France,
the beginning of the famous Charmes Gap, through which the German road
to Paris from the east ran, and still runs. Leaving Nancy behind us,
and ascending the Meurthe valley on the eastern bank, turning out of
it before Saint Nicholas du Port, we came presently to the most
completely war-swept fields that I have ever seen. On a perfectly
level plain the little town of Haraucourt stands in sombre ruins. Its
houses are nothing but ashes and rubble. Go out of the village toward
the east and you enter fields pockmarked by shell fire. For several
miles you can walk from shell hole to shell hole. The whole country