the weak joint in the armour! There it lay, up that harmless-looking
bye-road, not much more than ten miles away--a ten minutes' dash
would have brought us into the thick of the grey coats and spiked
helmets! The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles,
darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud.

Bar-le-Duc seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was in
its normal state of provincial apathy: few soldiers were about, and
here at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days on
the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn
spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the
first sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks
instinctively, in the eyes of the passers by, for a reflection of
that other vision, and feels diminished by contact with people going
so indifferently about their business.

A little way beyond Bar-le-Duc we came on another phase of the
war-vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August
invasion, and between Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-Francois the high-road
is lined with ruined towns. The first we came to was Laimont, a
large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes
Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely
levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle
of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between
scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts,
handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few
miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of
Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now
an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped
and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like