I expect when our four friends got back to the other fifty-six, or at all events when they learnt that they had missed bagging a Prefect of France, they had a poorish time of it. But that was not our affair. Thanks to the courage and nerve of M. Puech we had got safely out of a rather awkward fix, for at the best, if they had crippled our chauffeur or the car, we should have paid a prolonged visit to Germany. And thanks to the speeches at lunch, including, I am proud to think, the one in Public School French, we had escaped by ten minutes running our head into a much larger nest of hornets in the village. So we decided to put off our visit to Nomeny till another day. We had had enough of Germans for the present. Also we thought it more prudent to go home by a different road, at the back of the hills where the French batteries were stationed, round by Ste. Généviève and up the valley of the Moselle, especially as, before M. Lamure and the other party reached the village, when their car was panting after ours, one particular shell had fallen rather too near them to be pleasant, and there was no urgent need to repeat the experience. When we got back to Nancy, after getting stuck in the middle of a large field flooded by the Moselle, from which the car had to be dragged out by a passing team of artillery horses, M. Mirman wrote for me a _petit mot_ on one of his cards. It was dated Nancy, Dimanche 20 Septembre, 1914, and ran as follows:— “Léon Mirman, Préfet de Meurthe et Moselle, s’excuse très humblement de n’avoir pu montrer à M. Richard Campbell”—he always would call me Richard—“la pauvre ville de Nomeny, assassinée par les Allemands, et qui garde les traces des meutres commis sur des civils et de l’incendie systématiquement et scientifiquement organisée comme il en verra un exemple demain à Gerbéviller—et il lui remet cette carte en souvenir très amicale d’une promenade ... un peu mouvementée où le ‘feu’ et l’eau n’ont pu altérer leur commune bonne humeur. “Et vive l’Entente Cordiale d’hier qui a préparé l’action commun de deux grands nations pour assurer le triomphe de la civilization contre la Barbarie Teutonne!” So “now you know,” as M. Rogier wrote in the vivid account of our trip which he sent to the _Petit Parisien_, “why I didn’t go to Nomeny.” But at least I am glad that we tried to go. For it showed me first of all the sort of chances that a Prefect in the occupied provinces had to take in carrying out his duty, and secondly what our Allies mean by _sang-froid_. It seems to me that is rather a fine quality, in a motor or outside it, and that it will yet help us to win the war. CHAPTER XVIII THE ATTACK ON THE RIVER FORTS