the greatest disappointment of the first part of the war. The Germans are rather fond of mixing metaphors; for once let me imitate them. They had nibbled greedily at the Thistle of Nancy, but the Mailed Fist was not quite long enough to reach it. But the French troops, the men who had turned defeat into victory, had suffered horribly. In one division, 22,000 strong on August 23rd, only 8000 men capable of fighting were left on September 10th. Still, dead and living, they had done their work: de Castelnau and Pau, Foch and the XXth Army Corps, Dubail and Bigot, the men and guns of the Toul garrison and the whole of the armies that stood in that deadly breach, had covered themselves with undying glory and had written in letters of blood on the plains of Lorraine and in the spurs of the Vosges one of the most splendid chapters in the history of France and the world. The whole of the country over which they fought is now one vast cemetery. There are graves everywhere, by the roadside, in the woods, in the middle of exposed plateaux, in remote corners of fields, in the steep passes of the Vosges, in the trenches and village gardens where the dead men fought each other and died—long green mounds, carefully fenced and tended, where hundreds of broken bodies lie side by side in the last sleep of life, lonely little neglected heaps of earth, marked only by a rough cross of sticks and a tattered and weather-beaten _képi_. You cannot get away from them and their silence. While the battle was still raging the life of the countryside never seemed to come to an end altogether. Somewhere near, sometimes in the very places over which the shells were screaming, there were always—when they were not hiding in the cellars—old men and boys at work in the fields, children playing on the doorsteps, and dazed and anxious women occupied in household tasks. On the day of judgment, up to the very moment when the last trump sounds, I believe there will still be women washing clothes in the Meuse and the Moselle and the Mortagne and the Meurthe and all the other rivers of Lorraine and France which through all these terrible months have run red with the blood of France and Germany and their Allies—British and Belgians, Australians and Canadians, Sikhs and Ghurkas, Algerians and Moroccans.