Luncheon with the General Staff in an old bourgeois house of a
little town as sleepy as "Cranford." In the warm walled gardens
everything was blooming at once: laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn,
Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box
and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring
roll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which
the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous
to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps,
trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of
modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and
one felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the
untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life.

We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruined
hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its
foot. Our road ran below the long range of the "Grand Couronne," the
line of hills curving southeast from Pont-a-Mousson to St.
Nicolas du Port. All through this pleasant broken country the battle
shook and swayed last autumn; but few signs of those days are left
except the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible, and
the pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March are
replaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson the road
is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a
hill-top. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German
invasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of History
points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft
inscribed: _Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic