what depended on their success, and because they were being attacked, who put most fire into their fighting. They knew that they could not afford to give way. They were fighting in their own country, in the homes of their own kith and kin. Day after day and night after night long convoys of wounded jolted slowly and painfully past them, back to the hospitals of Nancy, where for all the preparations that had been made there was sometimes not room for them all to be admitted at once, and for a long time they lay on their stretchers in the corridors, and once or twice even in streets and squares of the town under the open sky, before they could be cared for. Almost more melancholy still were the troops of homeless refugees who were forced to turn their faces in the same direction, carrying with them in their hands, or piled in confusion on their ricketty carts, the poor little household gods that they wanted to save from the clutch of the marauding German or his cruel fires. But not all of them escaped. Some were too dazed by the suddenness of the invasion, or too old, or too young, or too feeble. Of these many were remorselessly butchered by the German soldiery, drunk or sober. Yet their deaths were not in vain. Wretched, uncounted, unconsidered victims of the war, they, too, had a hand in the victory. For if any one thing had still been needed to nerve the armies of Lorraine to do all that armed men can do for the defence of their country, it was the sight of the blighted homes and murdered bodies of these unfortunates. That was why France, and especially France’s soldiers in the field, realized long before England the deadly importance of putting every ounce of their strength into the war. They had no need of newspaper reports and blue books and recruiting appeals to awake them. They saw with their own eyes. “In Nomeny,” one of them wrote in a letter home, “the dead bodies of the inhabitants are more or less everywhere; on the staircases, in the cellars, on the piles of rubbish, in the open street. In one heap there were five corpses, two of which were children, and a little farther on were lying three young girls. Our impression was that these unfortunates had been shot down, and not killed by shells. In what were once the streets there are pigs wandering about and feeding on human flesh. Whenever we catch one we shoot it and bury it at once. Nothing is left of this charming little town but dangerous panels of walls, which every now and then tumble down. You can still make out the lines of the streets. The few houses that are left have been stripped and pillaged. You walk about on linen undergarments. The furniture has been disembowelled”—the word exactly describes what one sees in one house after another—“the doors torn off their hinges. On the floors there is a litter of clothes, letters, burst mattresses and eiderdowns, fragments of furniture, shattered pottery, broken food, dung, and other rubbish, so that you cannot set foot on the