“Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel.

“Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered.  “We have a much easier time than they.  Why shouldn’t we share some of their dangers?  And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire.”

“Are all the population here as usual?”

“Certainly, monsieur!” she said.  “The Germans can never take Nancy.  The French are going to take Metz!”

The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times.  Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front?  And madame sees that he gets it.  She is as proud of her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze battery of its practice.  There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow and under a blue mist.  And the air was dry; it had the life of our air.  Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished.  The people were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours.  They till well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to market, and the streets were spotlessly clean.  All the men of Nancy not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went about its business of throwing shells at the Germans.  On the dead walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel’s speech in the Chamber of Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now weather-stained.  Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any interior French town.  Though near the border, there is no touch of German influence.  When you walked through the old Place Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very French population which made them unconscious of danger while their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the French and the Germans.  To each every national thought and habit incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of the frontier.  Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier.  If he should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of war.