with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian
miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses,
clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by
all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. Now
and then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply-waggons,
or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village where
children and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakers
were selling hot loaves to the sutlers; and when we had extricated
our motor from the crowd, and climbed another hill, we came on
another cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat-fields. For
over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the
French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days
ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and
away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long
wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to
the Vosges.

IN ALSACE

August 13th, 1915.

My trip to the east began by a dash toward the north. Near Rheims is
a little town--hardly more than a village, but in English we have no
intermediate terms such as "bourg" and "petit bourg"--where one of
the new Red Cross sanitary motor units was to be seen "in action."
The inspection over, we climbed to a vineyard above the town and
looked down at a river valley traversed by a double line of trees.
The first line marked the canal, which is held by the French, who
have gun-boats on it. Behind this ran the high-road, with the
first-line French trenches, and just above, on the opposite slope,
were the German lines. The soil being chalky, the German positions
were clearly marked by two parallel white scorings across the brown
hill-front; and while we watched we heard desultory firing, and saw,
here and there along the ridge, the smoke-puff of an exploding
shell. It was incredibly strange to stand there, among the vines
humming with summer insects, and to look out over a peaceful country
heavy with the coming vintage, knowing that the trees at our feet
hid a line of gun-boats that were crashing death into those two
white scorings on the hill.

Rheims itself brings one nearer to the war by its look of deathlike
desolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the most
tragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senseless
disorganizing of innumerable useful activitie