The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said: “_Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous plaît!_” If you had a _laisser-passer_, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of ’70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This gave our journey interest. Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season. “They are not running this winter,” say the wits of Nancy. “For one reason, we have no opera--and there are other reasons.” An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; Zeppelins are within easy commuting distance. But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home. Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window shade closely drawn, this was a surprise. It was a threat, an anticipation, that has darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb dropping were nothing new to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business in the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army’s life. “Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel. “Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered. “We have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn’t we share some of their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire.” “Are all the population here as usual?” “Certainly, monsieur!” she said. “The Germans can never take Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!” The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her _poulet en casserole_ as any commander of a _soixante-quinze_ battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.