that bless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives; of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter.  But a common victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, and binding up the broken-hearted:  even they will not be enough, unless, beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not set themselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought, morally, socially, commercially.  As far as France and England are concerned, English people must go more to France; French people must come more to England.  Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, of wide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must be furthered by the mind of both nations.  Our English children must go for part of their education to France; and French children must be systematically wooed over here.  Above all the difficulty of language must be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a real disadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who has had a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, the language of the other.  As for the working classes, and the country populations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, as brothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lasting importance than anything else.

* * * * *

But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our long Sunday.  The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in the wind.  A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer, the Capitaine de G——­, who proved to be a most interesting and stimulating guide.  With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town, looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets.  For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long range in particular, surnamed by the town—­“la grosse Bertha,” which has done, and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves.  Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Luneville, in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result.  It has been in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hope of stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across the frontier.  But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted.  The children of its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm as our children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelin raid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at their games and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the refugies, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection of scenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child can forget.  For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged by the German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation.  And the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomeny, Badonviller,