The next morning I woke with the sense of Fourth of July. Bang! Bang! Bang! Such a barking of cannon crackers I had never heard. Still drowsy, I pushed open the French windows and looked down on the square. There I beheld a hundred or more men, women, and children, their eyes fixed on something in the air above and behind the hotel. Still the incessant barking of guns, with the occasional boom of something more impressive. With difficulty I grasped the fact. I was in the midst of a Taube raid. Somewhere over my head, invisible to me because of the wall of my hotel, a German aeroplane was flying, and all the anti-aircraft guns were shooting at it. Was it carrying bombs? Should I presently see or feel the destruction following the descent of these? But the Taube turned away, the guns fired less and less frequently, the people in the streets drifted away, the children to school, the men to work, the women to wait. It was just a detail in their lives, as familiar as the incoming steamer to the commuters on the North River ferryboats. Some portion of war has been the day's history of Nancy for nearly two years now. The children do not carry gas masks to school with them as they do at Pont-à-Mousson, a dozen miles to the north, but women and children have been killed by German shells, by bombs, brought by Zeppelins and by aeroplanes. There is always excitement of sorts in the district of Nancy. After a breakfast, broken by the return of the aeroplanes we had seen departing the night before for the patrol, we entered our cars and set out for the front, for the near-front, for the lines a few miles behind the present trenches, where Nancy was saved but two years ago. Our route lay north along the valley of the Meurthe, a smiling broad valley, marching north and south and meeting in a few miles that of the Moselle coming east. It was easy to believe that one was riding through the valley of the Susquehanna, with spring and peace in the air. Toward the east a wall of hills shut out the view. This was the shoulder of the Grand Couronné, the wall against which German violence burst and broke in September, 1914. Presently we came to a long stretch of road walled in on the river side by brown canvas, exactly the sort of thing that is used at football games to shut out the non-paying public. But it had another purpose here. We were within the vision of the Germans, across the river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the Bois-le-Prêtre, the familiar incident in so many communiqués since the war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to move troops along this road without inviting German shells. Yet it was impossible to derive any large feeling of security from a canvas wall, which alone interposed between you and German heavy artillery.