cloud of greenish-brown or gray-black would float solemnly over the crests of the trees.  This stretch of la rue Fabvrier was one of the most melancholy pictures it was possible to see.  Hardly a house had been spared by the German shells; there were pock-marks and pits of shell fragments in the plaster, window glass outside, and holes in walls and roofs.  I wandered down the street, passing the famous miraculous statue of the Virgin of Pont-a-Mousson.  The image, only a foot or two high and quite devoid of facial expression, managed somehow to express emotion in the outstretched arms, drooping in a gesture at once of invitation and acceptance.  A shell had maculated the wall on each side and above the statue, but the little niche and canopy were quite untouched.  The heavy sound of my soldier boots went dump! clump! down the silence.

At the end of the road, in the fields on the slope, a beautiful eighteenth-century house stood behind a mossy green wall.  It was just such a French house as is the analogue of our brick mansions of Georgian days; it was two stories high and had a great front room on each side of an entry on both floors, each room being lighted with two well-proportioned French windows.  The outer walls were a golden brown, and the roof, which curved in gently from the four sides to central ridge, a very beautiful rich red.  The house had the atmosphere of the era of the French Revolution; one’s fancy could people it with soberly dressed provincial grandees.  A pare of larches and hemlocks lay about it, concealing in their silent obscurity an artificial lake heavily coated with a pea-soup scum.

Beyond the house lay the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to weeds.  On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds.  In the center of the garden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy fountain was flowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and in this basin a poilu was washing his clothes.  He was a man of thirty-eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, he washed his gray underclothes with the soap the army furnishes, wrung them, and tossed them over the rose-bushes to dry.

“Does anybody live in this house?”

“Yes, a squad of travailleurs.”

A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches.  These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, are quartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them in order, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor.  Humble folk these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters.  Those at Pont-a-Mousson were nearly all fathers of families, and it was one of the sights of the war most charged with true pathos to see these gray-haired men marching to the trenches with their shovels on their shoulders.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Oh, yes.  We live very quietly.  I, being a stonemason and a carpenter, stay behind and keep the house in repair.  In summer we have our little vegetable gardens down behind those trees where the Boches can’t see us.”