hich the
ploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have been
partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the
nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweet
leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural
tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-past
woe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of
Gerbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of present
horror.

Gerbeviller, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the Meurthe,
must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted up
between scattered houses in gardens to the great Louis XIV
chateau above the town and the church that balanced it. So
much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley;
but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos.
Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of "the martyr town"; an
honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim! But as
a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can
surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up
from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had
perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and it
fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction
was no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically
executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little
garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the
Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the
nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the
fearless Teuton carries about for his land-_Lusitanias_ was tossed
on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders--almost
apologetically for German thoroughness--that any of the human rats
escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on
lurking bayonets.

One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of her
door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies;
and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured. It
seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a
blackened doorway the sign: "Monuments Funebres," and to observe
that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of
a lane called "La Ruelle des Orphelines."

At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood a
charming house