This afternoon, on the road to Gerbeviller, we were again in the track of the September invasion.  Over all the slopes now cool with spring foliage the battle rocked backward and forward during those burning autumn days; and every mile of the struggle has left its ghastly traces.  The fields are full of wooden crosses which the ploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have been partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the nucleus of a fiercer struggle.  But the landscape, in its first sweet leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-past woe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of Gerbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of present horror.

Gerbeviller, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the Meurthe, must have been a happy place to live in.  The streets slanted up between scattered houses in gardens to the great Louis XIV chateau above the town and the church that balanced it.  So much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley; but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos.  Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of “the martyr town”; an honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim!  But as a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can surpass her.  Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and it fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction was no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically executed human deed.  From the opposite heights the poor little garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the fearless Teuton carries about for his land-Lusitanias was tossed on each hearth.  It was all so well done that one wonders—­almost apologetically for German thoroughness—­that any of the human rats escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on lurking bayonets.

One old woman, hearing her son’s deathcry, rashly looked out of her door.  A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies; and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured.  It seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a blackened doorway the sign:  “Monuments Funebres,” and to observe that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of a lane called “La Ruelle des Orphelines.”

At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood a charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door, deep roof and ample gables:  it was in the garden of this house that my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Liegeay, a former Mayor of Gerbeviller, who witnessed all the horrors of the invasion.