Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a
door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that
we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps
the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in
summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were
full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street
ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated
attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine
starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to
the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You
have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you
cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have
only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are
clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of
Ste. Geneviève. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry
of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a
dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.
Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of
flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set
up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run
blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-à-Mousson, to Château-
Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad
crests of the famous Grand Couronné of Nancy, and faintly in the
distance we could see Metz.

"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.
For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.