emptied of coal.

"They are making shells," said the lieutenant in the tone that he might
have said, "They are making candy."

Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses the
Moselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest.

Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay the
historic valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between seven
hundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by erosion into
strange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the valley wall. The
ground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown with a good deal of
iron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light, friendly blue. A
strange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain deep cobalt of cloud
shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors of
Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steep
flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across the
autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely.

There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilomètres from Nancy,
slight signs, to be sure, but good ones--the presence of a military
smithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which stood by on rusty
wheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty artillery caissons parked
under the trees. But it was at B------, sixteen kilomètres from Nancy,
and sixteen from the lines, that I first felt the imminence of the war.
The morning train from Nancy had just stopped, to go no farther for fear
of shells, and beyond the station the tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metz
railroad advanced, rusty, unused, and overgrown with grass, into the
danger zone. Far behind now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared by