If ever Nancy is minded to raise a statue in its beautiful Place Stanislas to a battle-hero it will be surely to Noel-Marie Edouard Curières de Castelnau, for to him is due the existence of the city. During three tremendous weeks its fate hung in the balance—weeks in which Joffre was developing the final phases of his retreat and then delivering battle on the Marne. With flank and rear defended from the immense army that de Castelnau and Dubail prevented from passing the gap of Nancy, the master strategist was enabled to win. Nancy lies in the plain; it can be never defended, people said, and, therefore, it was to be left an open town. Did not the Treaty of Frankfort forbid the placing of cannon which would command German soil? Be that as it may, the doubters had forgotten le Grand Couronné, a series of wooded heights and steep plateaux, which marked the junction of Meurthe with Moselle and interposed a rugged barrier between the old Lorraine capital and the frontier. Here, with a forethought unusual in a country where so little had been prepared, trenches had been dug; and when de Castelnau was forced to retreat from the annexed province before an impassable barrier of artillery, he raised earthworks, installed barbed wire entanglements and brought heavy guns from Toul. It was the turn of the Germans to be surprised. With three attenuated army corps and four or five divisions of reserve, de Castelnau kept at bay an immense force of the enemy which battered savagely at the gates. How gaily the army marched out to the reconquest of annexed Lorraine and to occupy the Germans whilst the English landed in Belgium. It was a force thoroughly representative of France, for it was recruited from all parts. There were reservists from Bordeaux, from Marseilles, from Montpellier and from the West, but the heart of the crusade was the famous 20th Army Corps from Nancy—Lorrainers to a man—who had inherited the memory of the _année terrible_. With a gesture that expressed eloquently their spirit, they knocked over the frontier posts as they sang the _Marseillaise_ with the strenuous accent of the soldier engaging in a holy war. Great was their first enthusiasm, but great, also, their disappointment, for none met them in the streets; no hand flung flowers to them; no voice cried in gladness: "Vive l’Armée! Vive la France!" The silence was sinister, scarcely broken by the dull reverberation of distant cannon bombarding Pont-à-Mousson. It took them a little time to realise that the masters of the soil, fearing a demonstration, had threatened the inhabitants with its consequences. The silence and the gloom were fully explained.