We started out for Gerbéviller in a blinding sun, over a road leading through pleasant green meadows. That is one of the strange things of Lorraine—everywhere destroyed villages and everywhere well-planted fields, almost as if planted by the ghostly throngs of heroes who lie within. For in nearly every field there are the little clusters of black crosses, hung with flowers or the tricolor badge, or quite bare—with the number of men who lie within, or a date, scarcely ever a name. We went into the village, very ancient, that owes its name, Ville des Gerbes, to a miracle performed there by St.-Mansuy, past the completely destroyed château of the Lambertye family, and, going up a winding street, reached the house of Sister Julie, the heroine of August, 1914. On every side were gutted houses and piles of mortar and stones; one enterprising individual of the fair sex had installed against a resisting wall Le Café des Ruines, and some soldiers and civilians were sitting on bits of stone and masonry, drinking their _bocks_ and reading newspapers. The convent-building is in the principal street, and it was unharmed save for a little peppering of rifle-fire and a bit of cornice knocked off—_par la grâce de Dieu_, as Sister Julie afterward told us. Up three steps, and one finds oneself in a narrow, ancient stone hallway. Turning to the right, one enters a cool, peaceful room of the convent-parlor type—a large crucifix, lithographs of the last three popes, horsehair furniture, white crocheted doilies, everything spotless. In a moment Sister Julie came in. Her flashing eyes, her determined jaw, show her always to have been a woman of parts, and yet her whole life is really crowded into those few eventful days of the latter part of August, when “they” entered the town. For the rest, the quiet, useful routine of the nursing and teaching order of St. Charles de Nancy, which had been _chassé_ at the time of the French Revolution; a few nuns managed to remain hidden, and the order has been preserved. She is evidently a responsive soul, for she immediately began to enact the story of the arrival of the Germans, with a certain art in the presentment of the tragedy of the little town, gained, no doubt, by many recitals.