[Illustration:  Where the Armies are Contending in Alsace-Lorraine.]

[Illustration:  GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS NICHOLAIEVITCH The Russian Commander-in-Chief. _ (Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood._)]

[Illustration:  GEN.  RENNENKAMPF The Russian General Who Was Removed by the Grand Duke [Transcriber:  photo credit ineligible]]

Another French soldier lay wounded at the edge of a wood ten miles from Luneville.  When he recovered consciousness he saw there were only dead and dying men around him.  He remained for two days, unable to move his shattered limbs, and cried out for death to relieve him of his agony.  At night he was numbed by cold; in the day thirst tortured him to the point of madness.  Faint cries and groans came to his ears across the field.  It was on the morning of the third day that French peasants came to rescue those who still remained alive.

There have been several advances made by the French into Lorraine, and several retirements.  On each occasion men have seen new horrors which have turned their stomachs.  There are woods not far from Nancy from which there comes a pestilential stench which steals down the wind in gusts of obscene odor.  For three weeks and more dead bodies of Germans and Frenchmen have lain rotting there.  There are few grave diggers.  The peasants have fled from their villages, and the soldiers have other work to do; so that the frontier fields on each side are littered with corruption, where plague and fever find holding ground.

I have said that this warfare on the frontier is pitiless.  This is a general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions.  One of these was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont.  When dawn came they conversed with each other while waiting for death.  A French soldier gave his water bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst.  The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy.  “There will be no war on the other side,” he said.

Another Frenchman, who came from Montmartre, found a Luxembourger lying within a yard of him whom he had known as a messenger in a big hotel in Paris.  The young German wept to see his old acquaintance.  “It is stupid,” he said, “this war.  You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris.  Why should we have been made to fight with each other?” He died with his arms around the neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own tears.

I could tell a score of tales like this, told to me by men whose eyes were still haunted by the sight of these things; and perhaps one day they will be worth telling, so that people of little imagination may realize the meaning of this war and put away false heroics from their lips.  It is dirty business, with no romance in it for any of those fine young Frenchmen I have learned to love, who still stay in the trenches on the frontier lines or march a little way into Lorraine and back again.