The lieutenant of the American Section, à young Frenchman who spoke
English not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to Nancy to
take me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the rumble of
the commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in starting than our own,
was just beginning to be heard. Across the street from the
breakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman wearing a little black cape
over her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of a
confectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popular
patriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" shell tied
round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white
apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head;
and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in
a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I
was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that
night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.

"Please give me all your military papers," said my officer. I handed
over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and he
examined them closely.

"Allons, let us go," he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearing
the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.

"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?"

"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilomètres distant."

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to notice
anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy,
built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the