Another day that we spent with M. Mirman almost directly after our arrival in Nancy was rather more _mouvementé_. It was a week after the Germans had finally been driven back from Amance and Champenoux, and the news had been brought in that Nomeny, a town between St. Généviève and the frontier, had just been evacuated by the enemy. So M. Mirman was going to visit it, and he offered to take us with him. Before we started we lunched at the Préfecture with a fairly large party which included, besides M. Mirman and his eldest daughter, M. Abeille, his sécrétaire général (who has since been killed fighting for France), M. Mage, the Sous-Préfet of Toul, M. Guiran Scevola and M. Royer, two well-known French artists, painters in ordinary to the Ministry of War, temporarily attached as artillery privates to the Toul garrison, M. Dominique Bonnaud, the Parisian chansonnier, attached to the staff of the Préfecture, M. Jean Rogier, of the _Petit Parisien_, the only special correspondent of a London or Paris newspaper besides ourselves who stayed more than a few days in Nancy, and M. Puech, a big ironmaster of Frouard, five miles down the Moselle, who for the first part of the war acted as M. Mirman’s chauffeur, and went with him through some rather exciting scenes during his prefectorial visits. After lunch—it is a pleasant way the French have—there were a few speeches, one of which fell to the lot of the English correspondent of _The Times_, and was delivered haltingly and slowly in Public School French. As events proved afterwards, it was fortunate for us that there were speeches and that one of them took some time, for if we had started ten minutes sooner we should probably not have come back—at all events for some months. We set off at half-past one, M. Rogier and I in the Préfet’s car, an open one, with him and M. Puech, the rest in a larger and slower Limousine behind. At that time there were a large number of troops in and round Nancy—most of them the men who had fought in the Battle of the Grand Couronné—and for the first five or six miles we were constantly passing them, in the town and the villages and along the roads, marching, driving long processions of hooded country-carts, hauling down a captive balloon, lighting fires against the walls of the houses, cooking their meals, grooming their horses, furbishing up their arms and accoutrements, foraging, laughing, singing, shaving, washing, tailoring, eating, drinking, smoking, and chatting as busily and light-heartedly as if the enemy were a hundred miles away instead of only a little way beyond the horizon on the frontier.