But my own strong impression is that goodwill, and the Liberal fond, resting on the ideas of 1789, which, in spite of their Catholicism, has always existed in these eastern provinces (Metz, however, has been much more thoroughly Germanised than Strasbourg since the annexation), will see France through.  And meanwhile the recovery of these rich and beautiful countries may well comfort her in some degree for her desolate fields and ruined towns of the North and Centre.  The capital value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and the Germans leave behind them considerable additions to the wealth of the province in the shape of new railway-lines and canals, fine stations, and public buildings, not to speak of the thousands of fruit-trees with which, in German fashion, they have lined the roads—­a small, unintentional reparation for the murdered fruit-trees of the North.

* * * * *

A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General Gouraud’s notes and maps, up into the heart of the “front de Champagne.”  You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Chalons, with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations.  And presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness.  Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes.  Close by are all the places famous through years of fighting—­Souain, Navarin Farm, Tahure, the Butte de Tahure, and, to the north-west, Somme-Py, Ste. Marie-Py, and so on to Moronvilliers and Craonne.  In the south-western distance I could just descry the Monts de Champagne, while turning to the north one faced the slopes of Notre Dame des Champs, and recalled the statement of General Gouraud that on that comparatively open ground the fiercest fighting of last October had taken place.

And now, not a soul, not a movement!  Everywhere lay piles of unused shell, German and French, small heaps of hand-grenades and bundles of barbed wire.  The camouflaged battery positions, the deep dug-outs and strong posts of the enemy were all about us; a dead horse lay not far away; and in front, the white crosses of the graveyard.  A grim scene, under the January sky!  But in the very middle of the little cemetery some tender hand had just recently fastened a large bunch of white narcissus to one of the crosses.  We had passed no one that I could remember on the long ascent; yet the flowers were quite fresh and the thought of them—­the only living and beautiful thing for miles in that scarred wilderness, over which a creeping fog was beginning to gather—­stayed with me for days.