Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy. LES HALLES, RAON L’ETAPE—VOSGES. ] We stopped first at Montreux Vieux, the German name for which was Alt Munster—a little town a mile or so beyond the frontier on the Rhine-Rhone Canal, just before it takes a turn to Dannemarie and Altkirch—in which a month before there had been some brisk fighting. In their attack on the town, which suffered pretty severely from their guns, the Germans pushed forward their infantry as far as the canal, about two hundred yards across the fields from the French sandbag defences in front of the station. That was the nearest point to Belfort which they reached. Before they got to the movable bridge over the canal a sergeant who was on guard in the bridge-house, ran out under heavy fire and turned the wheel by which it is raised and lowered till it stood erect on the French side. “_Il était temps que j’y aille, mon Colonel_,” he said afterwards to his commanding-officer, when the enemy had been finally driven back from the canal banks to the woods round Romagny, a scattered village a mile or two off which we visited later in the afternoon. The Germans visited it too, on the same day that they failed to get into Montreux Vieux, and vented their spite on its feeble inhabitants (their own fellow-subjects) in the now familiar way, bombarding church and houses from a distance of a few hundred yards, and then setting fire to a quarter of its cottages and homesteads, in none of which were there any French soldiers. I have often thought since of the two pictures—the quiet sergeant by the canal bridge and those smoking piles of rubbish that once were peasants’ homes—though the destruction in Romagny was nothing at all compared with the wholesale ruin and desolation which we saw afterwards in Meurthe et Moselle and other departments further north. They seem to me typical illustrations of the difference between the French and German conceptions of making war. For we know now that one of the normal features of the much-vaunted German organization (till the deadlock of the trenches made it impossible) was the organized burning by squads of disciplined men of defenceless villages, peopled, as a rule, only by old men and women and children. Even for the malign fits of bad temper which found vent in these wanton acts of incendiarism, the mailed fist of the drill sergeant gave the signal, and the men, acting under his orders and those of his superiors, carried them out, working shoulder to shoulder, as part of the regular system. There was nothing systematic about the act of the French sergeant at the bridge-house. He just did his duty, as he saw it himself, and on his own initiative, when he felt that it had to be done. The German soldier, for all his courage, is part of a mass, a cog or a nut in an unthinking machine. The Frenchman, for all his discipline, remains an individual, and the French army is made up not of men burning