place is untouched--except for one
house. That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of the
village, was the birth-place and home of General Lyautey, one of
France's best soldiers, and Germany's worst enemy in Africa. It is
no exaggeration to say that last August General Lyautey, by his
promptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France. The Germans know
it, and hate him; and as soon as the first soldiers reached
Crevic--so obscure and imperceptible a spot that even German
omniscience might have missed it--the officer in command asked for
General Lyautey's house, went straight to it, had all the papers,
portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in the
court, and then burnt down the house. As we sat in the neglected
park with the plaintive ruin before us we heard from the gardener
this typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry. It is
corroborated by the fact that not another house in Crevic was
destroyed.

May 16th.

About two miles from the German frontier (_frontier_ just here as
well as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows.
East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon
is the boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day as
this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its
grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the
east for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill is
furrowed by a deep trench--a "bowel," rather--winding invisibly from
one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these
earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand
two or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing by
telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four
or five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who lived
there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different
classes, and had received a different social education; but their
mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly
young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French
faces: a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and
sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent
on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the
vanishing point of the great perspective.

From this vigilant height--one of the intentest eyes open on the
frontier--we went a short distance down th