for the father-in-law of Louis Quinze.  A flickering moonlight touched the gilding of the famous grilles that shut in the square; and the only light in the wide space seemed to come from this one hotel taken by the American authorities for the use of their officers and Red Cross workers passing to and from the Rhine.  When that square was built, George Washington was a youth of twenty, and after one hundred and seventy years it stood within the war-zone of an American Army, which had crossed the Atlantic to fight in Europe!

Next day we spent entirely in the American sector, between Nancy and Toul, where American road directions and sign-boards, and fine, newly-built camps and depots for the American forces met us in all directions.  A military policeman from a coloured regiment put us into the right road for St. Mihiel after leaving Toul—­a strongly-built, bronzed fellow, dealing with the stream of military and civil traffic at a cross roads in Eastern France with perfect ease and sang-froid.  The astonishment and interest of this American occupation of a country so intensely and ultimately national, so little concerned in ordinary times with any other life than its own as France, provincial France above all, never ceased to hold me as we drove on and on through the American sector; especially when darkness and moonlight returned, and again and again as we passed through wrecked villages where a few chinks of light here and there showed a scattered billet or two, the American military policeman on duty would emerge from the shadows, tall, courteous, self-possessed, to answer a question, or show the way, and we left him behind, apparently the only human being under the French night, in sole possession of the ruins round him.

But before darkness fell, during the central part of the day, we had crossed the southern lines of the convergent American attack on St. Mihiel.  Trenches and wire-fields and artillery positions had all belonged to the French battle-zone before the Americans took them over, and there had been fierce fighting here by the French in 1915.  But for three years the position had changed but little, till the newly-formed First American Army undertook in September the clearing of the Salient.

We left the car near the village of Beaumont, and walked to the brow of the low ridge from which the American attack started.  Standing among what had been the tranckees de depart, with the ruins of the village of Seichprey below us to the right, we had before us the greater part of the American battle-field—­Thiaucourt in the far north-east; the ridge of Vigneulles, which had been the meeting-point of the converging American attacks coming both from the north-west and the south-east; while in the near foreground rose the once heavily fortified Mont Sec.  The American troops went over the parapet at five o’clock on the morning of September 12th, and by the morning of the 13th their forces had met at Vigneulles, and the Salient, with its perpetual threat to the French line, had disappeared.  In three more days the Heights of the Meuse had been cleared, and the foremost Americans were already under the fire of the fortified zone protecting Metz.