When we came out into the ancient streets the western sky was aflame and there were translucent pale greens ahead of us. We turned again toward the open road and Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century. Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, followed by the great bishops and the builder-monks, who constructed the immense abbeys and the churches of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilderness had become what I saw it that afternoon. From the chimneys of its munition-factories, against the amber sky, there poured and twisted a wonder of gray and white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darkening, soot-blackened streets were overflowing with human energies spilling themselves into the greedy war-machine. There are vast monotonous workingmen’s quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being trampled in the wine-press.... It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of the _maire_, Mr. Keller, the celebrated house where the Prince de Beauvau was born, where the beautiful Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, where the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in 1801, and where, in 1914, the _maire_ lodged the generals of the German army. Madame was still at her hospital, so we left our cards and came back to the hotel. Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this pleasant room to motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is the program. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s blowing, but I bethink me of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, and those other saints, St.-Eucarius and St.-Loup, starting out in all kinds of weather, and of the _œuvre_ that we are to visit, founded last summer for children gathered in 1917 from villages where there had been bad gas attacks. The history of Lorraine piles high about me—the cannon boom. What a day to lie with your life’s blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields.... The motor horn sounds. CHAPTER III TOUL _October 13th._ We lunched at the Café Stanislas yesterday after the wildest of drives into Nancy, the Ford seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We did ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I eat except to “stoke the engine.” The proprietor, who left Alsace as a boy after 1870, stood and talked to us, as we ate our _œufs au beurre noir_, as French people alone can talk. He said “they” came only with fire and sword; the great Napoleon, who came with the same, had also his “Code” in his pocket. Then he spoke of the marvelous administration of Germany, the order and the use made of each one’s capacities, which was why they could _tenir_. “We only ask for a leader here in France, to be _bien menés_. All other things we have in abundance. But if a department is to be organized or reconstructed, it seems always to be given into the hands of some one knowing nothing about it.”