e most completely wrecked town in France.

You enter the village over a little bridge across the tiny Mortagne.
Here some French soldiers made a stand and held off the German advance
for some hours. There was no other battle at Gerbeviller, but for this
defence the town died. Never was death so complete. Incendiary
material was placed in every house, and all that thoroughness could do
to make the destruction complete was done. Gerbeviller is dead, a few
women and children live amidst its ashes, there is a wooden barrack by
the bridge with a post-office and the inevitable postcards, but only
on postcards, picture postcards, does the town live. It will be a
place of pilgrimage when peace comes.

From Gerbeviller we went by Bayon to the Plateau of Saffais, the ridge
between the Meurthe and the Moselle, where the defeated army of
Castelnau made its last and successful stand. The French line came
south from St. Genevieve, where we had been in the morning, through
the Grand Mont, across the plain by Haraucourt and Corbessaux, then
crossed the Meurthe by Dombasle and stood on the heights from
Rossieres south. Having taken Luneville, the Germans attempted to
cross the Meurthe coming out of the Forest of Vitrimont.

Standing on the Plateau of Saffais and facing east, the whole country
unfolded again, as it did at the Grand Mont. The face of the plateau
is seamed with trenches. They follow the slopes, and the village of
Saffais stands out like a promontory. On this ridge the French had
massed three hundred cannon. Their army had come back in ruins, and to
steady it they had been compelled to draw troops from Alsace.
Muelhausen was sacrificed to save Nancy. Behind these crests on which
we stood a beaten army, almost routed, had in three days found itself
and returned to the charge.

In the shadow of the dusk I looked across the Meurthe into the brown
mass of the Forest of Vitrimont. Through this had come the victorious
Germans. They had debouched from the wood; they had approached the
river, hidden under the slope, but, swept by the hell of this
artillery storm, they had broken. But few had lived to pass the river,
none had mounted the slopes. There were almost no graves along these
trenches. Afterward the Germans had in turn yielded to pressure from
the south and gone back. Before the Battle of the Marne began the
German wave of invasion had been stopped here in the last days of
August. A second terrific drive, coincident wit