The whole affair was singularly futile and pettish. It was like a little boy throwing stones from a safe distance at an opponent whom he has failed to beat in a fair stand-up fight, before he runs away. Possibly the object was to damage the Cathedral, which was exactly in the line in which most of the shells fell, as a parting message to the Nanceiens of what they might expect another time. Or they may have hoped to start a conflagration or an explosion by hitting the gasworks or the huge boilers of some big works close beside them. That was a thought which occurred to the young Yorkshire engineer in charge of the works (about the only Englishman in the town at the moment), who at once went down through the streets where the shells were falling and emptied the boilers himself. But anyhow there was no military object in the pyrotechnic display, since there were no soldiers sleeping in the town, and the chief inconvenience it caused—a very real one—was that in some of the hospitals the wounded had to be carried down from the upper wards to the ground-floor or the basement. Whatever the meaning or no-meaning of the bombardment, it was the beginning of the end, and a sign that the Germans were going. It was a habit of theirs always to destroy before they retired. Many of the acts of incendiarism were, so to speak, parting shots, or exhibitions of temper on a large scale. But they fought, too, with desperate if sullen courage. The retirement had now become almost general and once more the unfortunate villages in the path of the receding Army Corps were deluged by the double baptism of fire. Before the enemy were finally driven out of the forest of Champenoux the French had to charge them again and again, and whole regiments were decimated on both sides. But step by step, all along the line from Pont-à-Mousson, which was evacuated on September 10th, to the Vosges, they were forced steadily eastwards—from Champenoux along the Château-Salins road, and through the group of villages on the edge of the forest past Arracourt; from Velaine and Creceuil past Courbesseau and Serres; from Harraucourt and Dombasle along the canal, past Crévic and Maixe and Einville, from which some of them went north along the road to Vic and others kept along the banks of the canal to the forest of Parroy; and south of the canal and south of the Meurthe, through Lunéville and on each side of it, past Gerbéviller and Baccarat and Raon l’Etape and St. Dié—in all cases back towards the frontier which they had crossed in triumph three long weeks before. Except for a narrow strip on the edge of Lorraine and a rather larger tract in the Department of the Vosges west of the Donon, the occupation was at an end. The attack on the Epinal-Verdun line by way of Nancy had completely failed. The Kaiser and his men had looked at the promised land and turned their backs on it, leaving misery and disaster—and perhaps 50,000 dead—behind them, but carrying with them in their hearts