iers were about, and
here at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days on
the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn
spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the
first sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks instinctively,
in the eyes of the passers by, for a reflection of that other vision,
and feels diminished by contact with people going so indifferently
about their business.

A little way beyond Bar-le-Duc we came on another phase of the
war-vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August
invasion, and between Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-Francois the high-road
is lined with ruined towns. The first we came to was Laimont, a
large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes
Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely
levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle
of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between
scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts,
handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few
miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of
Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now
an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped
and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like
a human victim.

In this part of the country, which is one of many cross-roads, we
began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the
names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the
sign-posts thrown down and the enamelled _plaques_ on the houses at
the entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that this
precaution was taken by the inhabitants at the approach of the
invading army, another that the Germans themselves demolished the
sign-posts and plastered over the mile-stones in order to paint on
them misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremely
bewildering, for, all the villages being either in ruins or
uninhabited, there is no one to question but the soldiers one meets,
and their answer is almost invariably "We don't know--we don't
belong here." One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel who
knows the name of the village he is guarding.

It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless
wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris, and to wander, as
we did, for hours across a hi