put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.




CHAPTER IV

THE ROAD TO LILLE

_France, April._


There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big
white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township
for a hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the
great city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his
motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which
it points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our
lines the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.

And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of
their State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre
of human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look;
you can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it
is they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze
to hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner--you can
study the place as an astronomer studies the faint markings upon the
surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much
cut off from you as is the farthest star.