Near Amiens is the most beautiful of the duc’s castles, Lucheux, built in the eleventh century.  This she turned into a hospital during the first battle of the Somme in 1915, and as it could only accommodate a limited number she had hospital tents erected in the park.  Seven hundred were cared for there.  Lucheux is now a hospital for officers.

She herself is an infirmiere major and not only goes back and forth constantly to the hospitals in which she is interested, particularly Lucheux, but sometimes nurses day and night.

I was very anxious to see Lucheux, as well as Arras, which is not far from Amiens, and, a vast ruin, is said to be by moonlight the most beautiful sight on earth.  We both besieged the War Office.  But in vain.  The great Battle of the Somme had just begun.  They are so polite at the Ministere de la Guerre!  If I had only thought of it a month earlier.  Or if I could remain in France a month or two longer?  But helas!  They could not take the responsibility of letting an American woman go so close to the big guns.  And so forth.  It was sad enough that the duchess risked her life, took it in her hand, in fact, every time she visited the chateau, but as a Frenchwoman, whose work was of such value to France, it was their duty to assist her in the fulfillment of her own duty to her country.  Naturally her suggestion to take me on her passport as an infirmiere was received with a smile.  So I must see Arras with a million other tourists after the war.

The duchess prefers for reasons of her own to work, not with the noblesse division of the Red Cross, but with the Union des Femmes de France.  As she is extremely independent, impatient, and enterprising, with a haughty disdain of red tape, the reasons for this uncommon secession may be left to the reader.

And if she is to-day one of the most valued of the Ministere de la Guerre’s cooeperators, she has on the other hand reason to be grateful for the incessant demands upon her mind, for her anxieties have been great—­no doubt are still.  Not only is the duc at the front, but one of two young nephews who lived with her was killed last summer, and the other, a young aviator, who was just recovering from typhoid when I was there, was ill-concealing his impatience to return to the Front.  Her son, a boy of seventeen—­a volunteer of course—­in the sudden and secret transfers the army authorities are always making, sometimes could not communicate with her for a fortnight at a time, and meanwhile she did not know whether he was alive or “missing.”  Since then he has suffered one of those cruel misfortunes which, in this war, seem to be reserved for the young and gallant.  She writes of it in that manner both poignant and matter-of-fact that is so characteristic of the French mother these days: 

“I have just gone through a great deal of anguish on account of my oldest son, who, as I told you, left the cavalry to enter the chasseurs a pied at his request.