At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by the meadows of the silent crosses, skirting the hill of Léomont, with its great scars of 1914 shell-holes, beneath which is a little village with the strange name of Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it was once “Antelucus” (before the sacred grove), and afterward was a dependence of the priory of Léomont built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. Then we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road leading to Crévic. Great stretches of Lorraine, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, were flung out before us under rain-clouds and sunbursts—lovely stretches, with fields of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of red-stemmed osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root in which women and old men and little children were working, piling high red-white mounds or separating the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles. Crévic is shot to bits. Of the château of General Lyautey[15] but a few crumbling walls remain. Though the piles of stones and mortar are covered with the green of three summers’ growth, still the cannon are booming to the east and north. The perfectly banal church is intact. People were walking about the streets and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes, and there seemed many very little children. We passed out over an old bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great curtain of rain hung to the west near Dombasle, the smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught and held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and there were other great stretches of unspeakable beauty, soft, rolling, and radiant—crying out about the generations that have bent over them. The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely destroyed church of pure Gothic that workmen are at last roofing over; but three winters have already passed over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go out through the village in the direction of Dombasle, and suddenly against some gorgeous masses of clouds we see an _avion de chasse_, “type Nieuport,” as E. M., who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial, tells me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch pinning two gray velvety curtains together, where a ray of blinding light falls. Then it makes a series of marvelous _vrilles_, and I say to her, “How can men who do that love finite woman?” A great observation balloon, _saucisse_, hung in the sky, and another broad shaft of light lay on the far hills behind which lie intrenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets.