of the fighting in Lorraine, and a strange
silence has brooded over those battlefields. The spell of it has been
broken only by official bulletins telling in a line or two the uncertain
result of the ceaseless struggle for mastery.

Here are regiments of young men who have the right already to call
themselves veterans, for they have been fighting continually for six
weeks in innumerable engagements, for the most part unrecorded in
official dispatches. I had seen them answering the call to mobilization,
singing joyously as they marched through the streets. Then they were
smart fellows, clean shaven and spruce in their new blue coats and
scarlet trousers. Now war has put its dirt upon them and seems to have
aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their
faces. Their blue coats have changed to a dusty gray, but they are hard
and tough for the most part, and Napoleon himself would not have wished
for better fighting men.

Now for the first time since the beginning of the war there will be a
little respite on the Lorraine frontier, and in the wooded country of
the two lost provinces there will be time to bury the dead which
incumber its fields. Words are utterly inadequate to describe the
horrors of the region to the east of the Meurthe, in and around the
little towns of Blamont, Badonviller, Cirey-les-Forges, Arracourt,
Chateau-Salins, Morhauge, and Baudrecourt, where for six weeks there has
been incessant fighting. After the heavy battle of Sept. 4, when the
Germans were repulsed with severe losses after an attack in force, both
sides retired for about twelve miles and dug themselves into lines of
trenches which they still hold; but every day since that date there has
been a kind of guerrilla warfare, with small bodies of men fighting from
village to village and from wood to wood, the forces on each side being
scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines. This method
of warfare is even more terrible than a pitched battle.

"It is absurd to talk of Red Cross work," said one of the French
soldiers who had just come out of the trenches at Luneville. "It has not
existed as far as many of these fights are concerned How could it? A few
litter-carriers came with us on some of our expeditions, but they were
soon shot down, and after that the wounded just lay where they fell, or
crawled away into the shelter of the woods. Those of us who were unhurt
were not allowed to attend to our wounded