It was a desire to know something of what had been happening in the east which led me to travel to the extreme right.  Few correspondents have been in this part of the field since the beginning of the war.  It is far from their own line of communications.  For this reason there have been no detailed narratives of the fighting in Lorraine, and a strange silence has brooded over those battlefields.  The spell of it has been broken only by official bulletins telling in a line or two the uncertain result of the ceaseless struggle for mastery.

Here are regiments of young men who have the right already to call themselves veterans, for they have been fighting continually for six weeks in innumerable engagements, for the most part unrecorded in official dispatches.  I had seen them answering the call to mobilization, singing joyously as they marched through the streets.  Then they were smart fellows, clean shaven and spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers.  Now war has put its dirt upon them and seems to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces.  Their blue coats have changed to a dusty gray, but they are hard and tough for the most part, and Napoleon himself would not have wished for better fighting men.

Now for the first time since the beginning of the war there will be a little respite on the Lorraine frontier, and in the wooded country of the two lost provinces there will be time to bury the dead which incumber its fields.  Words are utterly inadequate to describe the horrors of the region to the east of the Meurthe, in and around the little towns of Blamont, Badonviller, Cirey-les-Forges, Arracourt, Chateau-Salins, Morhauge, and Baudrecourt, where for six weeks there has been incessant fighting.  After the heavy battle of Sept. 4, when the Germans were repulsed with severe losses after an attack in force, both sides retired for about twelve miles and dug themselves into lines of trenches which they still hold; but every day since that date there has been a kind of guerrilla warfare, with small bodies of men fighting from village to village and from wood to wood, the forces on each side being scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines.  This method of warfare is even more terrible than a pitched battle.

“It is absurd to talk of Red Cross work,” said one of the French soldiers who had just come out of the trenches at Luneville.  “It has not existed as far as many of these fights are concerned How could it?  A few litter-carriers came with us on some of our expeditions, but they were soon shot down, and after that the wounded just lay where they fell, or crawled away into the shelter of the woods.  Those of us who were unhurt were not allowed to attend to our wounded comrades; it is against orders.  We have to go on regardless of losses.  My own best comrade was struck down by my side.  I heard his cry and saw him lying there with blood oozing through his coat.  My heart wept to leave him.  He wanted me to take his money, but I just kissed his hand and went on, I suppose he died, for I could not find him when we retreated.”