I stood for a long time by that 1914 breach in the wall, and the grave of _Charles Carron, musicien_, looking out over the rolling fields in the late October afternoon, migrating birds passing against the amber sky, red vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and beeches; near me was a tangle of wild-plum bushes, stiffened blackberry-vines, and dried ramie. All except the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was in sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, russet, jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow rivers, slipping between bushes of osier and plum, and somewhere there is a slower, nigrescent canal scarcely a-move between willows and poplars. And those men who are out there where that dull thunder is!... I thought how often in her history the men that hunted in her forests or tilled her fields had reddened them with their blood, or, buried in them, had increased the harvests, fighting now against one invader, now another, being continually thrown back from power to power like a ball, with nothing changeless save the changelessness of their changing destiny—and its unescapableness. And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine prince, the Crusades began, and under a duke of Lorraine, Charles V, they ended. And of the holy glory of Jeanne d’Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, of the covenant of our own men. I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely of the natural world. As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of that band of lemon. The western sky became a vast ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat in it. The red roofs of Lunéville were transfigured, a crimson glow was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, outlined against a blue-white eastern sky. But only for a few minutes. The streets of Lunéville were already dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs. We stopped for tea at the house of Madame —— on the outskirts of the town. It had been occupied by the Germans that first August, and in one of the _salons_ was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not replastered or papered. “They” had rolled up her rugs and given them to her, and she and her four young daughters had lived in the upper stories during the occupation, and seen war very close from their windows. The only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I think, was missing. In the cellars and in the garden, whose walls are still breached and broken, dead and wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had lain. The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young aviators were there for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely linked, threaded the black streets to the Hôtel des Vosges. And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn. CHAPTER VI AT THE GUÉRINS’ _October 16th._ In the park of the château, sitting on an old stone bench under yellowing chest nut-trees.