obscure and imperceptible a spot that even German omniscience might have missed it—­the officer in command asked for General Lyautey’s house, went straight to it, had all the papers, portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in the court, and then burnt down the house.  As we sat in the neglected park with the plaintive ruin before us we heard from the gardener this typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry.  It is corroborated by the fact that not another house in Crevic was destroyed.

May 16th.

About two miles from the German frontier (frontier just here as well as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows.  East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon is the boundary between Empire and Republic.  On such a clear day as this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting.  From its grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the east for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill is furrowed by a deep trench—­a “bowel,” rather—­winding invisibly from one subterranean observation post to another.  In each of these earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand two or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing by telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four or five miles away.  Interesting as the place was, the men who lived there interested me far more.  They obviously belonged to different classes, and had received a different social education; but their mental and moral fraternity was complete.  They were all fairly young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French faces:  a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the vanishing point of the great perspective.

From this vigilant height—­one of the intentest eyes open on the frontier—­we went a short distance down the hillside to a village out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and puppies.  Below the terrace, lost Lorraine stretched away to her blue heights, a vision of summer peace:  and just above us the unsleeping hill kept watch, its signal-wires trembling night and day.  It was one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves.

Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a dark blur in our bird’s-eye view of the plain.  We passed into the forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts.  On all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched and sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition form between tree and house.  We were in one of the so-called “villages negres” of the second-line trenches, the jolly