Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?  This attitude seems human; it seems logical.  One liked the French for it.  One liked them for boasting so little.  In their effort at normality they had accomplished more than they realized; for one-sixth of the wealth of France was in German hands.  A line of steel made the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.

When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about railroad connections anywhere.  You went to the station and took your chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other conditions.  This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen.  The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red.  But for them and the number of women in mourning and one other circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy only a stop on the way.

The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said:  “Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous platt!” If you had a laisser-passer, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in charge at the next station.  In other words, monsieur, you must have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy.  You must have a military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were travelling alone in the zone of military operations.  The pulse of the Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward.  To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of ’70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine.  This gave our journey interest.

Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season.  “They are not running this winter,” say the wits of Nancy.  “For one reason, we have no opera—­and there are other reasons.”

An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; for Zeppelins are within easy reach of Nancy.  But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home.  Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded.  After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window-shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.

It was a threat, an anticipation, that darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment.  Bombardment and bomb-dropping were nothing new to Nancy.  The spice of danger gives a fillip to business to the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills.  Nancy saw the enemy beaten back.  Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army’s life.