May 14th.

Luncheon with the General Staff in an old bourgeois house of a little town as sleepy as “Cranford.”  In the warm walled gardens everything was blooming at once:  laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn, Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box and lavender.  Never before did the flowers answer the spring roll-call with such a rush!  Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of modern war.  Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life.

We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruined hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its foot.  Our road ran below the long range of the “Grand Couronne,” the line of hills curving southeast from Pont-a-Mousson to St. Nicolas du Port.  All through this pleasant broken country the battle shook and swayed last autumn; but few signs of those days are left except the wooden crosses in the fields.  No troops are visible, and the pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March are replaced by peaceful rustic scenes.  On the way to Mousson the road is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a hill-top.  It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German invasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of History points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft inscribed:  Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic hordes.

A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bit of rising ground.  The road is raked by the German lines, and stray pedestrians (unless in a group) are less liable than a motor to have a shell spent on them.  We climbed under a driving grey sky which swept gusts of rain across our road.  In the lee of the castle we stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs of Pont-a-Mousson and the broken bridge which once linked together the two sides of the town.  Nothing but the wreck of the bridge showed that we were on the edge of war.  The wind was too high for firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood just behind the Hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenches and bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valley the eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared.  But there the Germans were, drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watch-tower; and as one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls one gradually found one’s self re-living the sensations of the little mediaeval burgh as it looked out on some earlier circle of besiegers.  The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became. “There they are—­and