there—­and there.” We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms.  It was as if the earth itself were the enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades.  Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-cross ridges.  We were told that these were French trenches, but they looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp.

Suddenly an officer, pointing to the west of the trenched hill said:  “Do you see that farm?” It lay just below, near the river, and so close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals in the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemed to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. “They are there,” the officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate.  The loudest cannonade had not made “them” seem as real as that!...

At this point the military lines and the old political frontier everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon.  It was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky...

Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the river and entered Pont-a-Mousson.  It was by mere meteorological good luck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the guns would have been awake, and when they wake poor Pont-a-Mousson is not at home to visitors.  One understood why as one stood in the riverside garden of the great Premonstratensian Monastery which is now the hospital and the general asylum of the town.  Between the clipped limes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out three or four “dreadful hollows,” in one of which, only last week, a little girl found her death; and the facade of the building is pock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes.  Yet in this precarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same indomitable breed as the Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has gathered a miscellaneous flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by the bombardment, eclopes, old women and children:  all the human wreckage of this storm-beaten point of the front.  Sister Theresia seems in no wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over her roof.  The building is immense and spreading, and when one wing is damaged she picks up her proteges and trots them off, bed and baggage, to another. “Je promene mes malades,” she said calmly, as if boasting of the varied accommodation of an ultra-modern hospital, as she led us through vaulted and stuccoed galleries where caryatid-saints look down in plaster pomp on the rows of brown-blanketed pallets and the long tables at which haggard eclopes were enjoying their evening soup.