Shortly after our men took over their first sector on what is known as the Toul front, I was privileged to travel for several days directly behind this front in an army motor-car. The Toul sector was a part of the French front in a northeastern corner of the country drained by two historic rivers, the Meuse and the Moselle. Toul itself is an ancient walled town with a magnificent cathedral and a moat still in working order. Some sixty kilometers, or less than thirty-eight miles to the northeast, lies immortal Verdun, and eastward almost in a straight line is Nancy, the lovely capital of old Lorraine. Nancy is so close to the German lines that it has been bombed and raided many times. When I saw it the people were spending much of their time in bomb-proof cellars constructed for their protection by the municipality. How tenaciously the French cling to their homes was evident long before I reached Nancy. Spring was in the air in spite of cold wind and a wet clinging snow that fell and dripped through three or four disagreeable days. The fields surrounding the low villages had been freshly plowed, and here and there we saw gnarled peasants, old men and women, who stolidly dug and harrowed, just as their grandparents did when Frederick “the Great” raided the border near these very farms. Just as their ancestors did during ceaseless wars of old. Straight and white for miles ran the ribboned highroads between their avenues of tall poplars. But as we progressed farther north, the roads began to be cut up with great holes worn by heavy war trucks and gun carriages. Fields to the right and left put on a strange and sinister dress. Here were no peasants plowing, for those fields blossomed with a harvest of barbed wire entanglements, mazes of barbed wire so wound and woven, so thick and strong that only repeated shellings by heavy artillery could level them. To me they looked like some devilish parody of the rich vineyards I had seen only recently terracing the hills of southern France. A little farther on the fields were lined and crossed not only with barbed wire but with trenches, neatly dug and lined with a basketwork of willow withes. These trenches so far behind the lines amazed me. “Surely the Germans could not get as far as this,” I protested. “Probably not,” said the officer who was our escort, “but we are not taking any chances. Suppose our men were forced to retreat fighting. Well, here are rear defenses all ready for them.” My son being at that moment in Toul, waiting to go forward, I conceived a positive affection for those trenches, and the barbed wire entanglements began suddenly to look benevolent.