French Attack from Cemetery of Rehainviller near 258 Lunéville Church at Drouville 286 LIST OF MAPS PAGE Eastern Frontier 59 Alsace and the Vosges 71 Lorraine Frontier _Facing page_ 126 La Woevre ” ” 272 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VERDUN TO THE VOSGES CHAPTER I LONDON TO DIJON We left London on the evening of September the 8th with passports viséd for Dijon, and a faint hope that, if we were lucky, we might succeed some day in getting to Belfort, the immediate object of our journey. In ordinary times, and even now, after more than a year of the war, that is not a very difficult undertaking. In the second week of September, 1914, it was in its way quite a little adventure. Everything was obscure, everybody was in the dark. For all that most of us knew the retreat that had begun at Mons three weeks before was still going on. The possibility of the enemy pressing on to Paris was by no means at an end, and even in the eyes of those who had some inside knowledge of what was happening on the different fields of battle the risk was still so great that the French Government had left that capital for Bordeaux some days before.