For the people of Nancy the prospect was sufficiently alarming. It is not surprising that at that time some of them, though not many, migrated to what they thought were safer quarters. But they need have had no fears. To the north-east and east of the town, in the quadrant of the circle between Pont-à-Mousson and Lunéville, the legionaries of the XXth corps were to prove an impenetrable barrier. Once they had crossed the boundary river, the Seille, in the general retreat, there was no favourable position in which to make a stand until they came to the ring-fence of wooded heights which long before the war was christened by some French strategist the Grand Couronné of Nancy. The term is, as a matter of fact, rather a stretch of the imagination. If you stand at the top of any high building in the town and look eastwards towards the frontier (which is as near to Nancy as Wimbledon to Hyde Park Corner) you see, with one or two unimportant exceptions, no hills at all. The ground for the most part is flat and unbroken, rising in a gentle slope to the horizon five miles away. (Once and once only a body of German cavalry came over the rise, and, till they were driven back, were visible for a short time from the town.) On that side the Couronné consists only of the Forests of Champenoux and St. Paul, about seven miles north-east of the town, north and south of the Château-Salins road, the woods of Crévic and Einville north of the Marne-Rhone canal, a low ridge beyond Léomont on the north side of the last two or three miles of the road to Lunéville, and the Forest of Vitrimont south of the road. To the west of the town, and to the north in the direction of Metz, the Couronné is, however, well marked, and a semicircle of hills, about one thousand feet high, broken only by the valley of the Meurthe, stands high up above it, and sweeps round to the north-east, where the wooded Plateau of Amance carries on the curve almost as far as the forest of Champenoux. The position defended by the left wing of General de Castelnau’s army extended from Ste. Généviève, a few miles south-east of Pont-à-Mousson, past the heights of Mont St. Jean, La Rochette, and Amance (the rock on which the attack broke), and then by Laneuvelotte and Cerceuil across the plain to Dombasle, just east of St. Nicholas-du-Port and west of the forest of Vitrimont, in a line which is almost parallel to the course of the Meurthe below Nancy, and about five miles in front of it. From Dombasle, south of the river, it was continued in a slightly concave curve, as we saw in the last chapter, through Saffais, across the Bayon-Lunéville road, to Gerbéviller on the Mortagne.