e-forgotten war of '70.

This road has ever been one of the most strongly guarded highways in the
world, for, between the Moselle, at Metz, and the Meuse, the country is a
flat plain smiling under cultivation, with vines and cornfields
everywhere, and comfortable little homesteads of the peasantry. This was
once the great battlefield whereon Gravelotte was fought long ago, and
where the Prussians swept back the French like chaff before the wind, and
where France, later on, defeated the Crown Prince's army. The peasants,
in ploughing, daily turn up a rusty bayonet, a rotting gun-stock, a
skull, a thigh-bone, or some other hideous relic of those black days;
while the old men in their blouses sit of nights smoking and telling
thrilling stories of the ferocity of that helmeted enemy from yonder
across the winding Moselle. In recent days it has been again devastated
by the great world war, as its gaunt ruins mutely tell.

That road, with its long line of poplars, after crossing the ante-war
French border, runs straight for twenty kilometres towards the abrupt
range of high hills which form the natural frontier of France, and then,
at Haudiomont, enters a narrow pass, over twelve kilometres long, before
it reaches the broad valley of the Meuse. This pass was, before 1914, one
of the four principal gateways into France from Germany. The others are
all within a short distance, fifteen kilometres or so--at Commercy, which
is an important sous-prefecture, at Apremont, and at Eix. All have ever
been strongly guarded, but that at Haudiomont was most impregnable of
them all.

Before 1914 great forts in which were mounted the most modern and the
most destructive artillery ever devised by man, commanded the whole
country far beyond the Moselle into Germany. Every hill-top bristled with
them, smaller batteries were in every coign of vantage, while those
narrow mountain passes could also be closed at any moment by being blown
up when the signal was given against the Hun invaders.

On the German side were many fortresses, but none was so strong as these,
for the efforts of the French Ministry of War had, ever since the fall of
Napoleon III., been directed towards rendering the Cotes Lorraines
impassable.

As one stands upon the road outside the tiny hamlet of Harville--a quaint
but half-destroyed little place consisting of one long street of ruined
whitewashed houses--and looks towards the hills eastward, low concrete
walls can be s