At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of the scarfs.  They were official army chauffeurs.  If you have ridden through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an Eskimo, but not to your humble servant?  But the roads were perfect; as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New York to Poughkeepsie.  I need not tell you this if you have been in France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding the army’s secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of transportation on a bleak, snowy day.  At the outskirts of every village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries stopped the car.  Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you whizz by important posts.  He must show his pass.  Every sentry was a reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days without official sanction.

The sentries were men in the thirties.  In Belgium, their German counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I made.  No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an elan, a martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway.  The reason that we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in summer at home around the stove in winter.  All these villages were full of reservists who were indoors.  They could be formed in the street ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine starts to a fire.  Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to the bowler:  and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders.  You have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd.  But in Lorraine you have only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of Ste. Genevieve.  We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry of a lookout is on watch.  He seems quite alone, but at our approach a dozen of his comrades come out of their “home” dug in the hillside.  Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of flushing soldiers from their shelters.  A small, semicircular table is set up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner.  Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-a-Mousson, to Chateau-Salins, and other towns.  Before us to the east rose the tree-clad crests of the famous Grand Couronne of Nancy, and faintly in the distance we could see Metz.