May 15th.

I have seen the happiest being on earth:  a man who has found his job.

This afternoon we motored southwest of Nancy to a little place called Menil-sur-Belvitte.  The name is not yet intimately known to history, but there are reasons why it deserves to be, and in one man’s mind it already is.  Menil-sur-Belvitte is a village on the edge of the Vosges.  It is badly battered, for awful fighting took place there in the first month of the war.  The houses lie in a hollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into a plateau waving with wheat and backed by wooded slopes—­the ideal “battleground” of the history-books.  And here a real above-ground battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampled wheat.

The church of Menil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands—­a plain little house at the end of the street; and here the cure received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a chapel.  The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it has something to do with the battle that took place among the wheat-fields.  The candelabra on the altar are made of “Seventy-five” shells, the Virgin’s halo is composed of radiating bayonets, the walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French relics, and on the ceiling the cure has had painted a kind of zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Menil-sur-Belvitte’s handful of houses figures as the central orb of the system, and Verdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites.  But the chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the cure’s impassioned dedication to the dead.  His real work has been done on the battle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the names and death-dates of the fallen.  As he led us from one of these enclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratified vocation.  This particular man was made to do this particular thing:  he is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper.  In the hall of the “presbytere” hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies, the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting.  His “specimens” have changed, that is all:  he has passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche.

On the way to Menil we stopped at the village of Crevic.  The Germans were there in August, but the place is untouched—­except for one house.  That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of the village, was the birth-place and home of General Lyautey, one of France’s best soldiers, and Germany’s worst enemy in Africa.  It is no exaggeration to say that last August General Lyautey, by his promptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France.  The Germans know it, and hate him; and as soon as the first soldiers reached Crevic—­so