We were welcomed at Nancy by the Prefet of the Department, Monsieur Leon Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge, for the French Army, during our stay.  M. Mirman and his active and public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the desolated country round it.  From the ruined villages of the border, the poor refugies have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy has been dealing with their needs and those of their children.  Nor is this all.  M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government official, sent down some years ago from Paris.  Lorraine is ardently Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the natural friends of the Republican regime.  But President Poincare’s happy phrase, l’union sacree—­describing the fusion of all parties, classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a stronger echo than in Lorraine.  The Prefet is on the friendliest of terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic best for all alike.

Our first day’s journeyings were to show us something of the qualities of this Catholic world of Lorraine.  A charming and distinguished Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth of the kindness shown us.  And yet I like to believe—­indeed I am sure—­that there was more than this in it.  There was the thrilling sense of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed to me to make the background of it all.  Long as I have loved and admired the French, I have often—­like many others of their English friends and admirers—­felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to exist between their intimate life and ours.  It was as though, at bottom, and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament, combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real contact between the two nationalities.  In Lorraine, at any rate, and for the first time, I felt this “something” gone.  Let us only carry forward intelligently, after the war, the process of friendship born from the stress and anguish of this time—­for there is an art and skill in friendship, just as there is an art and skill in love—­and new horizons will open for both nations.  The mutual respect, the daily intercourse, and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields and woods of France—­soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their great fellowship!—­are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next come the efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help the French in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts