Two kilometres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell zone.  A cottage had been struck the day before, and the shell, arriving by the roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street.  In the facade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on its hinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-car through, rose from the ground and came to a point just below the overhang of the roof.  The edges of the broken stone were clean and new in contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling.

A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of the orifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles.

“They killed two there yesterday,” said the lieutenant, pointing out the debris.

The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a great foundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full of soldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing in doorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere.  And looking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, old uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray and blue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized that the old days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone forever, and that, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges and great battles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been created, a war that had not the chivalric externals of the old.

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.

Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road made a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then mounted a little spur of the valley wall.  Beyond the spur the road went through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy profusion.  Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a continuous line when seen from a certain angle.

“What are those for?”

“To hide the road from the Germans.  Do you see that little village down there on the crest?  The Boches have an observatory there, and shell the road whenever they see anything worth shelling.”

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and decay, but the stillness of life that listens.  The sun continued to shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed.  A village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted.  Beyond the still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky.  Running from the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was a brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower grass.  Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-black smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.