e, profoundly animal.

Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines

The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came
the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of
the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and
went to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man of
sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost
devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him,
standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellow
vest and white apron, I wondered just what effect the war had had on
him. Through the open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouette
of the roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke of
the vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard.

"You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago," said I.

"No," he answered; "I have been here only since November, 1914."

"You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then."

"Yes, indeed, I am Francais, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in a
cafe of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotel
porter."

"Tiens. What did you do?"

"I drove a coal team, monsieur."

"How, then, did you happen to come here?"

"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss had
gone to the cafe to take the place of a garcon whose class had just been
called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, and
being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job."

"You are satisfied with the change."

"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur."

"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front."

"Only my sister's son, monsieur."

"In the active forces?"

"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He was
wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is now
at the front again."

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down the
green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the street
below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby of
a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from the
illuminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French cities
to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then one
of them. The thousands of refugees from the frontie