CHAPTER VI
THE SINISTER INVASION
WE started early the next morning, threading a course among the pleasant hills of Lorraine. For brief spaces the idea of war seemed a distasteful imagining. It was necessary to glance for a reminder at the helmet of our military chauffeur. Or we would glimpse in a patch of woods a battery of soixante-quinzes. It was a Sunday, and often the artillerymen would be washing their clothing in a swiftly running brook, or, stretched in the thick grass, would be lost in a book or the rc-reading of a letter from home. We might pass a column of infantry, covered with dust, crowding to the side of the road to make way for our Etat Major automobile. And here and there we met lines of the busses that had disappeared from the Paris streets at the commencement of the war. Covered with netting and painted a dull grey, they carried fresh meat for distribution from point to point behind the lines.
We swerved into Lunéville, whose outskirts saw vicious house-to-house fighting during the
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