I have seen the first black crosses in a green field bounded by clumps of poplar against the clear sky. Revigny is a mass of ruins, roofless houses, heaps of mortar, and endless quantities of blue-clad, heavily laden men coming and going in the station—the eternal waiting, waiting for transit. Revigny is on the road to Verdun, Alexandre Dumas _fils_ told me. He gets out at Bar-le-Duc, which is now the point of departure to the fateful fortress. Groups of yellow Annamites are working at the roads. They are imported for that purpose, being of little use when the cannon sounds. Awhile ago two young Breton under-officers, colonials, came into the compartment. They had been at school together and had not met for ten years until just now on the train. They watched together the shifting scenery; one was coming from a young wife, the other from a fiancée. GONDRECOURT. Two symmetrical fifteenth-century towers pierce a pale-blue sky. One of the young Bretons tells me that for some time the train has been making a great détour, as the straight line to Nancy would take it through Commercy, daily bombarded by the enemy. PAGNY, _5.30 o’clock p.m._ Here we pick up the Meuse—and there still follows us the pink-and-gray ribbon of willow-fringed canal that links the Marne to the Rhine, and which all day long has looked like the marble the Italians call _cipollino_. But I remember that its greenness has been but lately colored with a crimson dye. TOUL (_where we thread up the Moselle_), _5.50_. We have just passed Toul. Great barracks are near the station, and on the opposite hill is the fortress, high against the sky, bound to Verdun by an uninterrupted series of forts. It is a _place de guerre de première classe_. The Romans had an encampment here, and Vauban made the fortifications of his time. And because the mind is not always held to the thing in view, even though it be of great moment, I thought how Toul was the town where Hilaire Belloc did his military service, “was in arms for his sins”; from here it was that he set out upon the “path to Rome” in fulfilment of his vow. Other things laid long away in memory came to mind, and I was only jerked back as my eye was caught by a group of German prisoners being marched past the station, one soldier, with a pointed bayonet, in front of them and another behind. And at Nancy we are to knit up the river Meurthe. CHAPTER II NANCY Nancy, a dream of the eighteenth century, with the réveillé of twentieth-century guns. We arrived at Nancy five hours late, at seven o’clock.