near the river, and so
close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals
in the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemed
to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. "_They are there_," the
officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass
suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest
cannonade had not made "them" seem as real as that!...

At this point the military lines and the old political frontier
everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal
the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It
was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and
towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky...

Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the
river and entered Pont-a-Mousson. It was by mere meteorological good
luck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the guns
would have been awake, and when they wake poor Pont-a-Mousson is not
at home to visitors. One understood why as one stood in the riverside
garden of the great Premonstratensian Monastery which is now the
hospital and the general asylum of the town. Between the clipped
limes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out three
or four "dreadful hollows," in one of which, only last week, a
little girl found her death; and the facade of the building is
pock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes. Yet in this
precarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same indomitable breed as
the Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has gathered a miscellaneous
flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by the
bombardment, eclopes, old women and children: all the human wreckage
of this storm-beaten point of the front. Sister Theresia seems in no
wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over
her roof. The building is immense and spreading, and when one wing
is damaged she picks up her proteges and trots them off, bed and
baggage, to another. "_Je promene mes malades_," she said calmly,
as if boasting of the varied accommodation of an ultra-modern
hospital, as she led us through vaulted and stuccoed galleries where
caryatid-saints look down in plaster pomp on the rows of
brown-blanketed pallets and the long tables at which haggard eclopes
were enjoying their evening soup.

May 15th.

I have seen the happiest being on earth: a man who has foun