of a “seventy-five” shell tied round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker’s boy in a white apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head; and from the nearby tobacconist’s, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette.  At nine in the morning I was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.

“Please give me all your military papers,” said my officer.  I handed over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and he examined them closely.

“Allons, let us go,” he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearing the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.

“How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?”

“About an hour.  Our headquarters are thirty kilometres distant.”

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move.  I looked round, eager to notice anything that marked our transition from peace to war.  Beyond the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the iron mines of French Lorraine in the eighties.  Through this ugly huddle we passed first:  there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the gutters,—­nothing to remind one of the war.

“Halt!”

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small, gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car.  From the door of a neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny yellow hair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out to look at us.

“Your papers, please,” said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant wearing a brown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on enormous fat legs, had followed the sentry out into the street.  The lieutenant produced the military permit to travel in the army zone—­the ordre de mouvement, a printed form on a blue sheet about the size of a leaf of typewriter paper.

“Pass,” said the sergeant, and saluted.  The sentry retired to his post on the sidewalk.  At the door of the wineshop the woman continued to stare at us with an animal curiosity.  Possibly our English-like uniforms had attracted her attention; the French are very curious about les Anglais.  Over the roof of an ugly row of working men’s barracks, built of mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the uproar of a great industry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing of iron on iron, and the heart-beat thump of a great hammer that shook the earth.  In a vast, detached building five great furnaces were crowned with tufts of pinkish fire, workmen were crossing the cindery yard dragging little carts and long strips of iron, and a long line of open freight cars was being emptied of coal.

“They are making shells,” said the lieutenant in the tone that he might have said, “They are making candy.”

Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses the Moselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest.