humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her tale.  She does not spare epithets in talking of “ces satanes Allemands”—­these Sisters and nurses of the front have seen sights to dry up the last drop of sentimental pity—­but through all the horror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing about her and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetual threat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitable absurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address the officer in command “because he was so tall that I couldn’t see up to his shoulder-straps.”—­“Et ils etaient tous comme ca,” she added, a sort of reluctant admiration in her eyes.

A subordinate “good Sister” had just cleared the table and poured out our coffee when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-fact tone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley.  She added calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus had just fallen a mile or two off, and that if we liked we could see the fighting from a garden over the way.  It did not take us long to reach that garden!  Soeur Gabrielle showed the way, bouncing up the stairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we came out on a grassy terrace full of soldiers.

The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near that it was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillside that seemed like any other.  But luckily somebody had a field-glass, and with its help a little corner of the battle of Vauquois was suddenly brought close to us—­the rush of French infantry up the slopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and, high up, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white puffs of the German artillery.  Rap, rap, rap, went the answering guns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tongued wood; and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle.

Though Soeur Rosnet had seen too many such sights to be much moved, she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarely planted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passing it laughingly about among the soldiers.  But as we turned to go she said:  “They’ve sent us word to be ready for another four hundred to-night”; and the twinkle died out of her good eyes.

Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed; for, as we learned a fortnight later from a three column communique, the scene we had assisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assault on the high-perched village of Vauquois, a point of the first importance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to the north of Varennes and commanded the railway by which, since September, they have been revictualling and reinforcing their army in the Argonne.  Vauquois had been taken by them at the end of September and, thanks to its