“You are satisfied with the change.”

“Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur.”

“I suppose you have kinsmen at the front.”

“Only my sister’s son, monsieur.”

“In the active forces?”

“No, he is a reservist.  He is a man thirty-five years of age.  He was wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is now at the front again.”

“What does he do en civil?”

“He is a furniture-maker, monsieur.”

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down the green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator.  In the street below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby of a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from the illuminated sign over the theater door.  There are certain French cities to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then one of them.  The thousands of refugees from the frontier villages and the world of military officials and soldier workmen mobilized in the ammunition factories had added to the population till it was actually greater than it had been before the war, and with this new population had come a development of the city’s commercial life.  The middle class was making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy, hardly more than eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches, forgot its danger till, on the first day of January, 1916, the Germans fired several shells from a giant mortar or a marine piece into the town, one of which scattered the fragments of a big five-story apartment house all over Nancy.  And on that afternoon thirty thousand people left the city.

The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front to the first-line trenches dawned cool and sunny.  I use the word “swathe” purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of the phrase “the front” be understood.  The thick, black line which figures on the war-maps is a great swathe of country running, with a thousand little turns and twists that do not interfere with its general regularity, from the summits of the Vosges to the yellow dunes of the North Sea.  The relation of the border of this swathe to the world beyond is the relation of sea to land along an irregular and indented coast.  Here an isolated, strategic point, fiercely defended by the Germans, has extended the border of the swathe beyond the usual limits, and villages thirteen and fourteen miles from the actual lines have been pounded to pieces by long-range artillery in the hope of destroying the enemy’s communications; there the trenches cross an obscure, level moor upon whose possession nothing particular depends, and the swathe narrows to the villages close by the lines.  This swathe, which begins with the French communications, passes the French trenches, leaps “No Man’s Land,” and continues beyond the German trenches to the German communications, averages about twenty-two miles in width.  The territory within this swathe is inhabited by soldiers, ruled by soldiers, worked by soldiers, and organized for war.